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ICONOCLASM 



AND W H ITEWAS H 



AND OTHER PAPERS 



IRVING BROWNE 

(Editor of the Albany Law Journal) 




NEW YORK 

JAMES OSBORNE WRIGHT 

860 Broadway 

1885 



?SlH4 

.13713 



Copyright, 1885, 
By Irving Browne, 



Press of J. J. Little & Co., 
Nos. 10 to 20 Astor Place. New York. 



PREFACE. 



In the ruins of a great fire in a city I once saw a long 
series of stone steps with columns and iron railings, 
standing at regular intervals in front of what had been a 
block of sumptuous dwelling-houses — pretentious por- 
ticos leading to nothing. That is what some prefaces 
are — large promise followed by inadequate fulfilment. 
Or, on the other hand, sometimes they serve as a vehicle 
of excuse for shortcomings of which the author is con- 
scious, or of deprecation of adverse criticism which he 
knows he deserves. For the following unpretending 
studies of a busy man, out of the line of his ordinary pur- 
suits, read at various times before learned and patient so- 
cieties, I will offer no apology, and will not shrink from 
criticism, even if they shall be found worth a critic's 
notice. 

One apology, however, I find I must make, but it is 
for a sin of omission and not of commission. In the 
paper on " Iconoclasm and Whitewash," I ought to have 
spoken of Mr. Story's poem, " The Roman Lawyer in 
Jerusalem," in which the excuse for Judas is strongly 
presented. The omission was not intentional, for I had 
long been familiar with the poem, and the apology is the 



IV PREFACE. 

more necessary from me, because Mr. Story is not only 
an accomplished artist and poet, as is well known, but he 
is also, as is not generally known, an accomplished lawyer 
and legal author. 

As to the essays, I will only say, as lawyers say when 
they proffer testimony which they know to be unim- 
portant, " I offer them for what they are worth." 

LB. 



! 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

iconoclasm and whitewash i 

Bibliomania 31 

Shakespearian Criticism 57 

Gravestones : Esthetically and Ethically Considered 87 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



In the reaction of Protestantism and Puritanism against 
the gauds of the Catholic Church, hard-headed and heavy- 
handed ascetics went about knocking off the noses and 
limbs of the statues which peopled the dim old cathedrals. 
A subsequent generation piously restored or renewed 
those works, and did their best with paint and whitewash 
to repair the ravages of the greater spoiler, time. Similar 
iconoclasts and whitewashers go about in literature. 

There is in human nature a singular and inconsistent 
tendency to soil the fame of the good and excuse the 
failings of the. bad; to smut the saints and repair the 
rascals. Calumny and charity seem to go hand-in-hand 
in historic judgment. The spirit of contradiction is re- 
luctant to admit the possession of superlative qualities in 
any. We strive to average the human race. In respect 
to this matter advocacy is much more easy than im- 
partiality. The arguments on both sides seem irrefraga- 
ble as they are separately presented. The advocates 
elude one another's grasp like weasels. They are lubri- 
cated all over with the oil of sophistry and rhetoric. 
And so difficult is it to determine which is right, that a 
chronic habit of scepticism on historical topics springs up 
among scholars. It may be asked whether contempo- 
raneous estimate is not more apt to be right than con- 
i 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



jectures centuries after the event ? Or shall we say, with 
Sir Robert Walpole, " Anything but history, for history 
must be false." 

Daring investigators are daily depriving us of our most 
familiar and cherished traditions of great men. Thus, 
under the scrutiny of Niebuhr and Mommsen have per- 
ished all the legends of early Roman history, the delight 
of our boyhood. Leonidas had been overrated ; he had 
from 7,000 to 12,000 men at Thermopylae, instead of the 
famous 300. Caesar never said to any ferryman, " You 
carry Caesar ; " nor when he escaped by swimming at 
Alexandria did he hold his Commentaries high and dry in 
one hand. And when Brutus stabbed him he did not 
say, "Et tu, Brute / " And it is very doubtful that he 
ever said, " Veni, Vidi, Vici" ^Esop was not hump-backed. 
Omar did not burn the Alexandrian Library, because it 
was not he but Amru who took the city in 640, and the 
library had been dispersed by Theophilus 250 years before. 
Mr. Gould, in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 
spoils the story of Tell shooting the apple from his son's 
head. He shows that a similar tale was told at intervals 
for centuries before, in Indian, Persian, and Norse legends, 
and even in English ballads, and predicated of all sorts of 
heroes, and various kinds of vegetables and missile 
weapons. The story of Canute by the sad sea waves was 
not thought of until a century after his death. It is now 
said that Newton never saw any apple fall, or if he did, 
it raised no thought of gravitation in his mind. So, when 
Galileo recanted his theory that the earth moves, as un- 
questionably he did, he did not say, in an undertone, as 
all along we have been informed, " It does move, though." 
Very likely he thought it, but he was too wise to say it. 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



And so the old guard, at Waterloo, did not say, " The 
guard dies, but never surrenders," and then die ; but 
having fought as long as they could, they sensibly sur- 
rendered and lived. It is much more likely that their 
commander, Cambronne, on being summoned to sur- 
render, made the very undignified exclamation attributed 
to him by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, and which he 
pronounces so fine. So Wellington, at Waterloo, did not 
say, " Up, guards, and at them ! " for commanding generals 
are not wont to be so near the lines, nor thus to give their 
orders ; but like a sensible, hard-headed old gentleman 
and stubborn fighter, as he was, he ordered, through his 
aids, " a general advance all along the line," as he himself 
tells us. Nor did he say, " Oh, that night or Blucher 
would come," for Blucher's troops were at hand in large 
numbers as early as three o'clock in the afternoon, and 
lost 6,000 before night. General Packenham, the British 
commander, on the eve of the battle of New Orleans, did 
not give as the watchword, " Beauty and Booty." Ethan 
Allen, on the capture of Ticonderoga, did not demand 
the fort " in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Con- 
tinental Congress," but he said, " In my own name and in 
the name of the Continental Congress," and added, with an 
oath, "and I will have it." Considering Colonel Allen's no- 
torious unbelief in the Great Jehovah, I think the latter ver- 
sion decidedly the more probable. So General Taylor, " old 
Rough and Ready," at Buena Vista, did not say, "A little 
more grape, Captain Bragg," but more probably he said, as 
has been reported, " Bragg, give 'em hell !" for he was not 
so polite as Sir Joseph Porter in Pinafore. And Mrs. Glass, 
author of the famous cookery book, did not write the one 
jest recorded of her, in the recipe for cooking a hare — 



1C0N0CLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



"first catch your hare." What she said was, probably, 
" scotch," i. e., scorch, or singe, your hare. It would not 
surprise me, after this, to be informed that " single-speech 
Hamilton " never made any speech at all ! 

One of the most startling heresies of modern days is 
the theory that the Homeric poems were the songs of 
various strolling bards, handed down by oral tradition. 
This theory has been strongly advocated in the last cen- 
tury by Wolff and Heyne, eminent German scholars, and 
very recently resuscitated. There are difficulties in the way 
of attributing these magnificent poems to one unlettered 
bard, but they are trifling in comparison with the difficulties 
besetting the theory that they were the work of several 
unlettered bards. There is a plan and a coherence about 
them which renders it impossible that one brain should not 
have conceived them, or at least, that if one brain did not 
conceive them both, each was not the offspring of a single 
mind. The arguments in favor of the single authorship 
have been arrayed for the unlearned reader in an unanswer- 
able manner by Grote, and by Mure in his History of Grecian 
Literature. 

A recent writer has apologized for the monstrous crimes 
of Caligula on the extraordinary theory that they were in 
reality practical jokes. Mr. Merrivale seems to incline to 
the view that the youth was half-mad. 

There is probably no name in literature more hated and 
despised than that of Machiavelli, who wrote a book 
counselling princes to commit the most monstrous in- 
iquities. The very diabolism of the book seems calcu- 
lated to prevent any acceptance of its inculcations, and 
to awaken a suspicion that the author could not have 
been in earnest. De Quincey thinks he has discovered 
that the work was intended ironically, and as a covert re- 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



buke to the wickedness of rulers. Carlyle seems inclined 
to the same view. Macaulay takes the opposite view. 
De Quincey's may be correct, and I hope it is ; but if so, 
it is unfortunate for the author's reputation that he did 
not accompany his treatise with a key or an antidote, or 
adopting an expedient which Artemus Ward has since 
found so serviceable, write at the end, " This is sarkasti- 
kle." But however innocent or praiseworthy Machia- 
velli's intentions, it is probably too late to rehabilitate his 
reputation, and he must continue to be ranked as the 
wickedest of authors, and to furnish our familiar name 
for the devil — " Old Nick." It seems sad indeed that 
one who would not have been safe in speaking plainly, 
should be condemned to infamy as a participant in crimes 
which he really abhorred. 

Mary Magdalen, Sappho, Xantippe, Aspasia, and Lu- 
crezia Borgia have figured as very immoral or disagreeable 
ladies. Xantippe, who was too cross and ugly to be liable 
to the accusation of unchastity, has found champions in 
modern times who contend that she was not a shrew, or 
that at all events she did not scold Socrates more than 
was good for him. Thomas Starr King uttered a brilliant 
defence of the unphilosophical lady. Socrates was doubt- 
less a very trying husband, and not a " good provider." 
Aspasia has been defended against the charge of being a 
courtesan and the mistress of Pericles, and has been de- 
picted as a very learned and rather strong-minded lady, 
who ran counter to Grecian custom by leading a public 
life, and thus incurred the odious reputation attaching to 
her, but between whom and Pericles there really existed 
nothing more that a Platonic attachment. This is not 
incredible. Athens was a gossipy place ; its inhabitants 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



were always trying to hear some new thing. It is possible 
that this accusation is as unfounded as the charge that 
Socrates corrupted the morals of the Athenian youth. It 
has been quite currently accepted that Lucrezia Borgia 
was a monster as fatal as Rappaccini's Daughter, and yet 
while Guicciardini, Pontanus, Victor Hugo, and Donizetti 
have represented her as a " Maenad with a vial of poison 
in one hand and a dagger in the other," Ariosto and 
others have declared her a model of every virtue, and Mr. 
Gilbert, her latest biographer, has divested her character 
of all romance whatever. 

As Mr. Ebers informs us in a note in An Egyptian 
Princess, it is now supposed by the best authorities that 
Sappho was not a naughty woman, and did not leap from 
the Leucadian cliff to cure herself of love, and find death 
in the attempt. Mr. Mure, in his History of Grecian Lit- 
erature, accepts the old theory of Sappho's licentiousness, 
but pronounces against the Leucadian leap. He finds in 
the looseness of Sappho's writings ample proof that she 
was of impure character. This does not always follow. 
For example, Mrs. Behn's novels are excessively licen- 
tious, but we are not aware that her own character has 
ever been impugned. Against the probability of the leap, 
Mure adduces the fact that Sappho was old and plain at 
the time in question. But neither age nor ugliness has 
always prevented women from falling desperately in love. 
It seems that those nearly contemporary with the poetess 
believed both these allegations against her. 

As to Mary Magdalen, it is said there is no evidence 
whatever that she was not pure. Her lunacy by no means 
draws unchastity in its train. The modern appellation of 
" Magdalen " is therefore a misnomer. 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



On the other hand : some believe that Lucretia, the 
Roman, was anything but chaste, and took her own life 
through fear of discovery and exposure. 

As to Beatrice Cenci, so long bewailed as an outraged 
saint and martyr, victim of a father's unnatural lust ; the 
heroine of Shelley's great drama ; the subject of Guido's 
divine picture, " over which innumerable multitudes have 
glowed and wept," and of Harriet Hosmer's exquisite 
statue ; Beatrice, it is now confidently asserted, was a 
bad young woman, who had an amour and an illegitimate 
child, and unjustly accused her watchful father in order 
to screen herself from punishment for his murder. Guido's 
picture, it is now said, is not a portrait of Beatrice ; he 
never saw her, and did not come to Rome until eight 
years after her death. It is small recompense for the loss 
of Beatrice and Lucretia to have saved Sappho, Xantippe, 
Aspasia, and Lucrezia, although Mary Magdalen counts 
higher. 

But what shall be said of the man who denies the mar- 
tyrdom of Jeanne d'Arc? M. Delepierre has discovered 
documents which indicate that if she burned at all it was 
for love, for she was married and became the mother of a 
family at Metz ; that she received payments from her 
brother in 1435 and 1436, and that in 1439 sne received a 
present from the city of Orleans for her services during 
the siege. Many other documents corroborate the theory 
that the tale of her execution was invented to throw 
odium on the English. This from a Frenchman, too! 
But if we are astonished at the candor of the Frenchman, 
what shall we say of the patience of the English people, 
contemporary with the Maid, which uncomplainingly suf- 
fered so foul an imputation? 



8 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

We must give up Godiva, too. The tale of Leofric 
and Godiva, and the ride of the latter through Coventry, 
" clothed on with chastity," while " the shameless noon 
was struck and hammered from a hundred towers," is a 
baseless legend. Coventry did not exist at that day. 
With Godiva, " Peeping Tom " must go down. 

To come from retail to wholesale, we must surrender 
the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne, in spite of their 
bones now visible there. De Quincey says the idea arose 
from the name of a nun, Undesimilla, and its resemblance 
to undecim millia. 

Two of the most abominable characters in English his- 
tory are Richard III. and Henry VIII. But the former 
has found a recent champion, who says : " During Richard's 
brief reign of three years he showed himself to be an en- 
lightened and wise monarch, far beyond the age in which 
he lived. He trampled out a system of taxation that was 
unjust, and passed wise laws on landed property. His 
parliament was declared by impartial historians to have 
been the most admirable for protecting and improving the 
general national interests since the time of Edward I., 
two hundred and fifty years before. He was at the same 
time a patron of literature. The laws of the land were 
printed in his reign for the first time ; previously they had 
existed only in manuscript and French, and hence were 
inaccessible to the masses. Let us picture him to our 
minds, not in the light of a hump-backed usurper, deep in 
the blood of friends and relatives. He was an avowed 
devotee of fashion, an accomplished gentleman, a saga- 
cious leader, an acute politician, a wise statesman, and a 
just legislator." I breathe more freely. I always thought 
Shakespeare made him too bad to be real. It is evident 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



that Anne had a more correct estimate of him than the 
mob. Let some new Cibber re-adapt Shakespeare's 
drama to the changed conditions, and let us forget old 
Henry, the princes, Clarence, and the rest of them, and 
let the ghosts of Bosworth Field be laid. 

Henry Eighth, of England, has been almost uniformly 
depicted as a cruel and sensual tyrant. Mr. Froude, how- 
ever, has come to his rescue. The great historian argues 
that we can place no reliance on contemporaneous estimates 
of his character, for he had incurred the enmity of both 
the great religious parties ; that he had an intense longing 
for male issue to succeed to his throne, it being supposed 
that female issue could not inherit the sovereignty ; that 
his wives whom he put to death were bad women, Anne 
Boleyn having been condemned by the unanimous judg- 
ment of seventy of the principal and most independent 
men in the kingdom, and Catherine Howard by her own 
unquestioned confession ; that he lived most harmoniously 
with Jane Seymour, by whom he had a son, and directed 
in his will that he should be buried by her side. This 
defence of Henry involves the condemnation of Anne 
Boleyn, and so the historian has a task doubly hard. The 
desire to hand down a throne to one's descendants fre- 
quently makes a great man stoop to injustice, as in the 
case of Napolean and Josephine, but we cannot shut our 
eyes to the evidence that in addition to this desire, Henry 
was a grossly sensual beast. Mr. Froude's defence is a 
very ingenious piece of advocacy without evidence, but 
can hardly reverse the verdict of three centuries. It does 
however convince us that Henry was a man of great na- 
tive talents and strength of character. 

The character of Queen Elizabeth stands in a new light 



10 ICON OCL ASM AND WHITEWASH. 

under the researches of Motley and Froude. This extraor- 
dinary woman has furnished a contradiction to the theory 
that women are not fit to rule, and to her have been attrib- 
uted nearly all the virtues of which human nature is capa- 
ble, and all the prosperity of one of the longest reigns and 
one of the most distinguished epochs in English history. 
She is familiarly and affectionately denominated " Good 
Queen Bess," but after reading the revelations of modern 
historians, especially Motley, it seems impossible to avoid 
the conclusion that she was one of the meanest characters 
in history — despotic, violent, intolerant, false, hypocritical, 
fickle, timid, penurious, credulous, ungrateful, unscrupu- 
lous. The splendor of her reign is not so much due to 
any merits of her own as to the wisdom, foresight, and 
firmness of her great councillors and soldiers ; yet it can- 
not be denied that Queen Elizabeth loved her country, 
and this, with her learning, constitutes her only title to 
gratitude or respect from the careful students of history. 
Like her father, she was a strong character, but she 
seems not to have inherited his sensual passions. 

Naturally we turn from Elizabeth to her rival and vic- 
tim, Mary. Disputation concerning her character is no 
new thing, but within a few years there seems to have 
been a revival of the sentimentality that long ago strove 
to construct a saint and a martyr out of an indubitable 
murderess and adulteress. Mary had all the vices of the 
worst family that ever sat on the English throne, and 
nothing but the necessities of sectarian controversy could 
have blinded scholars to her true character. The weakness 
of the cause of her adherents is illustrated by their desper- 
ate charge of forgery of the casket letters, which no dispas- 
sionate student can now believe not to have been genuine, 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



and by the damning fact, that at least she married the 
known murderer of her husband, with his hands unwashed 
from that crime. Mr. Froude even strips this wretched 
queen of the one gift to which it has always been supposed 
she had an indefeasible title — her traditional beauty. Gen- 
eral de Peyster insists that she was six feet tall. An early 
portrait represents her as tall as Darnley. Her execution 
seems to have been an unavoidable act of self-defence on 
the part of Elizabeth, only marred by the harshness and 
hypocrisy which accompanied it. In Schiller's Mary 
Stuart one gets a powerful and touching, but extremely 
unfaithful portrait of this queen — a very tigress in her 
beauty, her treachery, and her cruelty. 

Elizabeth reminds us of Dudley, Earl Leicester, her 
favorite. The readers of Scott's Kenilworth have carried 
away a bad impression of this man, and have probably 
shed many tears over his unfortunate wife, Amy Rob- 
sart. But a recent biographer asserts that their marriage 
was public ; that the whole of Amy's married life was be- 
fore her husband was created Earl of Leicester ; that she 
never was at Kenilworth ; that he did not acquire it until 
three years after her death ; that Sir Richard Verney, 
(" Varney ") was high sheriff, and a very worthy gentle- 
man, who died naturally in his bed ; that Tony Foster 
was a decent man ; that Dudley lived openly with his 
wife except during the last two years of her life, when he 
was obliged to dance attendance on the queen ; that there 
is no evidence that they lived unhappily or that he neg- 
lected her, but on the contrary, her own letters show 
that she had full authority to transact his business in his 
absence, and his accounts show that he provided munifi- 
cently for her; and finally, that she acted strangely 



12 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

shortly before her death, and probably died by suicide 
or an accidental fall. Scott's authority " was the venom- 
ous book called Leicester's Commonwealth, concocted 
against Dudley by his enemies." 

By virtue of a high-sounding phrase, pronounced after 
Pavia, Francis I. long imposed on mankind — " We have 
lost all save honor ! " — an utterance worthy of a great 
man. But Francis was not great in any point ; he was 
simply a gallant soldier. Not even a skilful commander ; 
the dupe of an intellectual king like Charles V. ; without 
state wisdom ; the slave of mistresses, uncaring for his 
people. 

Of the awful denial of Shakespeare's authorship I 
shall speak in another place. 

The great Lord Bacon, who has come down to us in 
Pope's epigrammatic judgment as " wisest, brightest, 
meanest of mankind," finds in Mr. Dixon a brilliant advo- 
cate against the charges of treachery to his patron, Essex, 
and receiving bribes as a judge. The sum of this defence 
seems to be that in Bacon's day all judges took bribes and 
all courtiers were ungrateful. This is equivalent to say- 
ing that Bacon was no worse than his contemporaries. 
The answer to this is that his contemporaries, at all events, 
seemed to think it wrong for a judge to take bribes, and 
punished Bacon for so doing. Therefore, Bacon was un- 
deniably inferior in moral sense to his contemporaries. 
Indeed, he did not attempt to excuse the act except by 
saying that he never sold justice, that his judgments were 
always conscientious, although he might have received a 
present from one party to the suit. In respect to Essex- 
there can be no doubt that Bacon was disloyal to his 
benefactor. Bacon was a selfish man, a time-server, wait- 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 13 

ing on courts, and intent on his own fortunes. That pos- 
terity to whose judgment the great man committed his 
reputation has done his unparalleled genius full justice ; 
but there are spots on the sun, and there are these dis- 
tinct blemishes on Bacon's character. 

We have long supposed that Joe Miller, if not witty 
himself, was at the least " the cause that wit was in other 
men ; " that he was the collector of jests and the pub- 
lisher of such a collection. But now it is said that he 
never did anything of the sort ; that he was a respectable, 
dull, and singularly grave actor, and that the jest-book 
attributed to him was not put forth until long after his 
death — perhaps attributed to him on the principle of lux 
a non hicendo. 

The first Napoleon, after having been more ridiculously 
slandered in his lifetime than any other great man in 
modern history, was afterward elevated to the position of 
a demi-god, and now is suffering from a reaction under 
the disclosures of Lanfrey, Metternich, and Madame de 
Remusat. It has even been discovered that his name was 
not Napoleon, but Nabulione ! So near have we come to 
verifying Archbishop Whately's mock demonstration that 
he never lived. This greatest man of modern history had 
many petty weaknesses and some great vices. His great- 
est vice was in believing that mankind possessed no virtue. 
He was a man on a colossal scale of intellect and passions, 
but his moral attributes were dwarfish in comparison. 
His detractors may talk about the Napoleon " legend," but 
it is true that he captured every great capital in Europe 
but one ; that the apparition of his cocked hat and gray 
coat on the sands of Boulogne threw England into trep- 
idation ; that he taught the nations how to make war, and 



14 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

that he was only quelled at last by being smothered by 
numbers. 

Guicciardini, whom Isaac D'Israeli pronounces a trust- 
worthy historian, tells us that Martin Luther was so ter- 
rified by being placed under the ban by the emperor, 
Charles V., that had he received some preferment he 
Would have renounced his errors ; but he was thrown into 
such despair by the threats of Cardinal San Sisto, the 
apostolic legate, that he did not care to make an effort to 
save himself. Can it be possible that good Protestants 
must relinquish the story about the devils and the roof- 
tiles? Can Protestants afford to exchange Luther for 
Mary? 

In the history of our own country the court of review 
has been making great havoc of reputations. To begin at 
the beginning, the claims of Columbus to the honor of 
first promulgating the idea of a Western hemisphere, and 
of discovering it, have been strenuously controverted in a 
recent book by a Western writer. It is this author's be- 
lief that the Northmen had discovered this continent long 
before Columbus, and that their discovery was known in 
his time. This is a great piece of irreverence, almost equal 
to speaking disrespectfully of the equator, which Sydney 
Smith pronounced the most awful instance of scepticism 
conceivable. But as Dr. Schliemann in digging up old Troy 
came upon a still older city under it, so this writer might 
well have gone back from the Northmen to the Phoeni- 
cians, of whose prior occupancy of this country there 
exist very strong proofs in Yucatan and elsewhere. The 
idea that Columbus' discovery was but a rediscovery is 
rapidly gaining ground among modern scholars. It is 
highly probable that the ultima Thule of the ancients was 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 1 5 

a traditional survival of maritime discoveries in the dim 
morning of history. At all events, it seems pretty certain 
that the story of Columbus and the egg is an invention. 

Mr. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico has 
long been the delight and boast of our countrymen, but 
now comes Mr. Wilson, who argues that Mr. Prescott's 
authorities are unreliable ; that they were a pack of lying 
and bragging soldiers and priests, whose aim was to glorify 
the exploits of Cortes, without any regard to truth or 
probability. Mr. Wilson asks, with considerable force, 
how, if the Aztecs were the cultivated and numerous peo- 
ple described by the Spanish historians and reported by 
Mr. Prescott, they could have been overrun by a few hun- 
dred men at arms? Where are the remains of their 
achievements in architecture and the other arts ? Mr. 
Prescott's rhetoric will never cease to charm, but the his- 
torical authority of this work has received a damaging 
shock from Mr. Wilson's criticisms. And so great is Mr. 
Prescott's reputation, and so long have the traditions 
which he narrates been told and credited, that compara- 
tively little attention is paid to his critic, and so posterity 
will continue to believe, I suppose, that six hundred Span- 
ish soldiers overran and conquered a country inhabited by 
some millions of people advanced in civilization and the arts. 

One of the most ruthless results of modern historical 
iconoclasm has been the demolition of Pocahontas. About 
the prosaic and somewhat common name of John Smith, 
until recently, has entwined one of the sweetest of 
legends. But alas for faith in history and in human nat- 
ure ! and alas for some of the first families of Virginia ! 
the fair fame of the lovely copper-colored maiden has 
received a deadly smirch from a prying investigator. We 



1 6 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

are now assured that the Indian princess was a mere camp 
follower of the whites, and of the most light and naughty- 
behavior. Captain Smith was notoriously a very gallant 
man among the ladies, and it is not incredible that she 
had the strongest motive for rescuing the adventurer from 
the club of her father. Others say that Smith, who was 
a notorious liar, invented the story of his rescue. A 
writer in Scribners' Magazine points out the anachronistic, 
if not apochryphal character of the painting of the bap- 
tism of Pocahontas, in the national Capitol at Washing- 
ton. We are fain to dismiss Pocahontas with a sigh. 

Must we give up Plymouth Rock and the 22d of 
December ? I confess I was always inclined to scepticism 
about that rock ; it seems an instance of detail too 
romantic for prosaic credence. The descendants of the 
Pilgrims have taken great care of it — fenced it in — pity 
they did not take better care of an undoubted " land- 
mark " like the Province House, or the Hancock House, 
and that they have allowed the Old South Church to 
suffer threats of demolition. But it is now said by Mr. 
Sidney Howard Gay, that the Pilgrims probably did not 
land first at Plymouth, and certainly not on the 22d of 
December ; and on the base of Mr. Ward's statue of the 
Pilgrim, in Central Park, the date stands December 2 1st. 
The exact case is thus summed up by Mr. Curtis in a re- 
cent " Easy Chair," in Harper s Magazine : " It was on 
the 21st of November, new style, that the Mayflower cast 
anchor in the bay which is now the harbor of Province- 
town, Cape Cod. The Pilgrims went ashore, but found 
no water fit for drinking, and in a little shallop which the 
Mayflower had brought a party began to explore the 
coast to find a proper place for a settlement, and on the 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. If 

1 6th of December, new style, they put off for a more ex- 
tended search. On Saturday, the 19th, they reached 
Clark's Island, in Plymouth Bay or Harbor, so called from 
Clark, the chief mate, who first stepped ashore, and on 
Sunday, the 20th, they rested and worshipped God. On 
Monday, the 21st of December, they crossed from the 
island to the main-land, somewhere probably in Duxbury 
or Kingston, which was the nearest point, and coasted 
along the shore, finding in some spots fields cleared for 
maize by the Indians, and copious streams. They decided 
that somewhere upon that shore it would be best to land 
and begin the settlement, but precisely where they did 
not determine, and sailed away again on the same day, 
the 2 1st, to rejoin the Mayflower at Cape Cod. 

" The next day, therefore, the 22d of December, the 
Plymouth shore and waters relapsed into the customary 
solitude, and the little band of Pilgrims were once more as- 
sembled upon the Mayflower, many miles away. It was 
not until the 25th of December that the famous ship left 
Cape Cod, and on the 26th she dropped anchor between 
Plymouth and Clark's Island. Not before the 30th was 
Plymouth finally selected as the spot for settlement, and it 
was not until the 4th of January, new style, that the Pil- 
grims generally went ashore and began to build the com- 
mon house. But it was not until the 31st of March that all 
the company left the ship. The actual authorities upon the 
subject are of course very few. But they have been care- 
fully collated by Mr. Gay, in his Bryant's History of the 
United States, and the story is there clearly told." I 
believe that this demolition of the 22d of December is a 
poetic retribution upon the Puritan people for their scof- 
fing at the 25th ! 



1 8 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

The heroes of our revolutionary period have come down 
to us in colossal proportions. I have long suspected that 
it was impossible for any man to be so insupportably 
good as Washington has generally been represented. We 
would not detract from his unquestionable moral grand- 
eur, but it is certainly a relief to ascertain that he was a 
man and not a god. Our countrymen have long since 
ceased to " take any stock" in the hatchet story, but still 
we do not believe he would lie. We believe, rather, that 
like Mark Twain, he could tell a lie, but wouldn't. He 
probably was no better than Moses, who was vexed at the 
rock, and it appears that he swore awfully on one or. two 
occasions, notably at General Lee at Monmouth ; but we 
do not suppose him a profane man. He is reported to have 
laughed once at seeing a soldier blown over by the con- 
cussion of a cannon, but we do not suppose he was always 
giggling like a school-girl. He played at cards for money, 
like other gentlemen of his time, but we do not accuse him 
of being a gambler. It is thought that he was not quite 
so cold as Joseph, but no one has ventured to say that he 
was grossly licentious. He was an aristocrat, fond of 
show, cold and formal in manner, rather unapproachable, 
and his administration was extravagant in the President's 
personal expenditure. His political contemporaries 
thought him no saint ; on the contrary, no public man of 
his day or since has been worse abused. It is quite pos- 
sible to believe that Washington was an exceptionally 
great and good man, but impossible to believe him the 
prig and " goody" that foolish biographers have made 
him. On the other hand, Mr. McMaster, in his recent 
history, in his eagerness to expose his faults, hardly does 
justice to a shining character when he says : 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 1 9 

" His true biography is still to be prepared. General 
Washington is known to us, and President Washington, 
but George Washington is an unknown man. When at 
last he is set before us in his habit as he lived, we shall 
read less of the cherry-tree and more of the man. Naught, 
surely, that is heroic will be omitted, but side by side 
with what is heroic will appear much that is common- 
place. We shall behold the great commander repairing 
defeat with marvellous celerity, healing the dissensions 
of his officers, and calming the passions of his mutinous 
troops. But we shall also hear his oaths, and see him in 
those terrible outbursts of passion to which Mr. Jefferson 
has alluded, and one of which Mr. Lear has described. 
We shall see him refusing to be paid for his services by 
Congress, yet exacting from the poor mason the shilling 
that was his due. We shall know him as the cold and 
forbidding man with whom no fellow-man ever ventured 
to live on close and familiar terms. We shall respect and 
honor him for being, not the greatest of generals, not the 
wisest of statesmen, not the most saintly of his race, but 
a man with many human frailties and much common 
sense, who rose in the fulness of time to be our political 
deliverer." 

Mr. Bancroft has incidentally shown that Greene, Read, 
and Schuyler were quite ordinary men, who made mis- 
takes and had some weaknesses. Hereupon the angry 
brood of their descendants, whose main stock in trade has 
been the reputation of their ancestors, have waged a 
pamphlet war upon the unhappy historian, which has 
kept him as busy as a fisher upon an Adirondack lake in 
the fly season. What will all our school-boys say to Mr. 
Dawson, who essays to demonstrate that General Putnam 



__ 



20 ICON OCL ASM AND WHITEWASH. 

was a very small-sized hero ; that the story of the wolf- 
den is apocryphal ; that Horse Neck Hill, down which 
the pictures in school histories represent the gallant man 
galloping, brandishing his sword in the most dangerous 
manner, was but a moderate declivity ; and that the sur- 
prising number of bullet-holes which the general received 
through his blanket, on his escape from the Indians in 
Canada, is explained by the circumstance that he wore his 
blanket rolled up on his back, and that when the blanket 
was unrolled, the perforations would appear to have been 
made all by one bullet ! 

On the other hand, there has been a dismally futile 
attempt very recently to extenuate the offence of Arnold. 
It is a mistaken idea that Arnold's merits were not recog- 
nized by the government and the commander-in-chief. 
Washington well knew his merits and his weaknesses, and 
while he did not grudge him the praise due a gallant 
fighter, saw that he had neither the moral nor the intel- 
lectual qualities fitting him for an important general com- 
mand. Arnold was a bad man ; his crime was without 
excuse ; and history has given him his deserts. 

But has not history given Major Andr<§ rather better 
than his deserts ? His fate excited among his enemies 
the sympathy naturally flowing toward a young man 
meeting an ignominious death with fortitude, and his 
countrymen have given him a monument in Westminister 
Abbey. But Andre" was evidently a sort of carpet-soldier, 
the pet of ladies, the envy of fellow officers, the hero of 
the Mischianza, a dabbler in amateur theatricals, and a 
bad poet ; and we should take his death more to heart if 
he had not, in his letter to Washington, hinted at retalia- 
tion on the persons of our troops, prisoners in the enemy's 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 21 

hands at Charleston, if he were harmed. He also slan- 
dered the incorruptible men who captured him, insinuating 
that they were on the point of yielding to his bribes and 
releasing him, and that they carried him into the Amer- 
ican camp only in expectation of a larger reward ; thus for 
a time in our Congress the reputation of these patriots 
seemed in danger of obscuration. We turn from him to 
our own Nathan Hale with feelings of love and pride. It 
would be more becoming in Cyrus Field to raise a monu- 
ment to Hale in New York than to Andr6 at Tarrytown. 

It is now asserted that Tom Paine was neither an atheist 
nor a drunkard. 

And then there is Judas, than whom no historical 
character stands in greater need of whitewash, and who 
has accordingly received, at the hands of a German com- 
mentator, a very decent and plausible coat of that allevi- 
ating mixture. The hypothesis of the apologist is, in 
substance, this : Christ was by his disciples supposed to 
be the temporal Messiah or king, whose coming had been 
predicted, and who was to restore the faded glories of the 
Jewish dynasty. Christ tried to disabuse his disciples of 
this idea. Judas was bent on compelling Him to 
declare Himself in his supposed character, and so betrayed 
Him into the hands of the Jewish authorities, trusting 
that self-defence would compel Him to assume His tem- 
poral sovereignty, and that His disciples would accord- 
ingly receive authority and reward. On the failure of his 
scheme, he did not " hang himself," as is now generally 
conceded, but was choked to death by an overwhelming 
rush of grief and excess of remorse. So here we have the 
greatest criminal in history recommended to mercy. There 
is nothing unreasonable or improbable in this theory. 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 



On the commonly accepted theory there is no adequate 
motive for the betrayal. Money, evidently, was not the 
motive, for Judas returned the money. A deep-dyed vil- 
lain would have kept it. Judas evidently was disap- 
pointed in the result of his work. On the common theory, 
why should he have been? He had done just what he 
set out to do. Judas was filled with remorse and sorrow. 
The dark traitor would not have been. Things had evi- 
dently gone differently from what Judas anticipated, and 
spurning the price of innocent blood, he died of grief. I 
love to cherish this belief, for it somewhat lightens the foul- 
est blot on humanity, and mitigates an act which Christians 
and unbelievers must otherwise unite in pronouncing the 
most awful crime recorded in the history of our race. 

This subject is aptly illustrated by the different esti- 
mates put upon popular favorites in literature during their 
lives and after their death. The tendency of posthumous 
criticism is to separate the man from his works and to 
measure his works by his personal character. We may 
point to Dickens and Thackeray as examples. They were 
the idols of the novel-reading public during their lives, 
their works were anxiously waited for, their lightest breath 
moved to tears or laughter. Now that they are gone, the 
people have opened their eyes to what they might have 
known all along — that they were weak men in many re- 
spects, and hence the popularity of their works is suffer- 
ing a reaction. Dickens wore flashy jewelry, was not an 
ideal husband, lacked sincerity, breadth, and forecast ; 
while the great snob-killer was himself a snob, charmed 
by the smile, chilled by the frown of a duke. But what 
of that? Is Samuel Weller the less amusing; Florence 
Dombey the less filial ; Sidney Carton the less heroic ? Are 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 23 

Colonel Esmond and Becky Sharp the less strong and 
true to nature, and is the Book of Snobs less trenchant 
and wholesome ? 

On the other hand, men whose works suffered lack of 
contemporary interest because of clouds upon their au- 
thors' characters, have come out of obscurity after death 
has removed their authors to the judgment of another 
world. Shelley is an example of this. Is he any less the 
infidel ? 

Some authors, whose works were contemporaneously 
popular, but who were themselves ostracized on account 
of their personal vices, have since their death received 
absolution. Thus we are erecting statues and busts to 
Byron and Poe, and writing their biographies anew. Are 
they any less the rake and drunkard ? 

So there is a strong tendency to apologize for and even 
commend " George Eliot " for breaking the laws of God 
and man to promote her own selfish happiness. Great 
woman as she was, she was not great enough to defy the 
better public opinion. " Hard case," no doubt, for two 
people genuinely in love with one another ; but how much 
more lovely their lives would have been if they could 
have sacrificed their selfishness and their passions, and 
lived like pure friends ! Biography is full of harder cases, 
borne uncomplainingly and devotedly. Society has winked 
at this great woman's wrong-doing because she was so 
great ; but the true nature of her act is disclosed when we 
reflect that she deliberately ran the risk of bringing inno- 
cent children into the world who would have no name, and 
no rights to speak of, and at whom the finger of scorn 
would always have been pointed. As for the " romance " 
of the affair, she characterized it by marrying a man much 



24 ICON CLASH AND WHITEWASH. 

younger than herself as soon as Lewes was conventionally 
cold ! No one can read her life without being struck by 
her enormous selfishness ; the intellectual goddess is clay. 

And in respect to some authors of great popularity dur- 
ing their lives, and then and now above reproach in their 
character, posterity seems to take delight in detracting 
from their performances simply because they obtained so 
much applause while their authors lived. Macaulay illus- 
trates this phase. Because he was not a Bacon in phi- 
losophy or a Hallam in historical judgment, we are assured 
that he was superficial and prejudiced. One recent critic 
even assures us that he will be remembered for nothingbut- 
his Roman Ballads! By-and-by another reaction will 
come, and his brilliant essays and his marvellous history 
will be restored to their proper place. So now the great 
iconoclast, Carlyle, after half a century of adulation, is 
suffering a course of detraction. 

No man was more universally a favorite in his lifetime, 
both personally and in his works, than Tom Moore. Few 
are less thought of now. It is said to be one of the tradi- 
tions of Printing House Square that the obituary notice 
of Moore, as originally written toward 1830, covered 
some two pages of the Times, and was extravagant in its 
praise and regret, but that as it was rewritten from time 
to time during the next quarter of a century, it gradually 
became shorter and less eulogistic, till when the occasion 
came for its use it was comparatively brief and exceed- 
ingly moderate. 

How capricious the judgment of posterity upon literary 
men may be is illustrated by Sir Henry Taylor's recent 
declaration that Southey was " the greatest man " of his 
time in literature ! 



JCONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 2$ 

Iconoclasm has been busy with the heroes of the tales 
that delighted our boyhood. 

It seems that the tale of Sir Richard Whittington and 
his cat, or rather the story of Sir Richard Whittington 
and the tail of his cat, has no foundation ; but there is an 
unnecessary refinement of cruelty in the process of de- 
stroying our faith. A " cat " in his days was a vessel 
built in a peculiar form for carrying coals, in which busi- 
ness Sir Richard became rich, and the Moors of the story 
were his smutty-faced coal-heavers. The legend has been 
gravely discussed by antiquarian societies, and its authen- 
ticity asserted by learned men; but in truth, it was a 
familiar tale in several other countries long before Whit- 
tington's time. The solution above given was put forth, 
perhaps originated, by Foote, in one of his comedies, in 
which he ridiculed the antiquarians. In one of the por- 
traits of Whittington, representing him with his hand on 
a skull, the skull has been changed to a cat. It is a pity to 
lose Whittington's cat. The cat has been abolished in 
our army and navy. Would that it could be abolished 
from our backyards ! But the famous cat of the legend 
might well have been spared us, and it is by no means 
certain that the good man had not some association with 
the feline race that gave rise to the legend. We prefer to 
believe that he was fond of cats, like Montaigne, who was 
depicted with his cat. 

So Cinderella had no glass slipper. The translator has 
mistaken vair (sable) for verre (glass). Sable-trimmed shoes 
were worn by royalty, and such the fairy gave her favorite. 

The iconoclast has not stopped at individual instances, 
but has undertaken to demolish the whole human race. 
Thus, one of the most generally accepted and most base- 



26 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

less of conjectures is that which holds that men in modern 
times are physically degenerate and continually degenerat- 
ing. There is no evidence anywhere that man was ever 
bigger, stronger, swifter, or hardier, under similar condi- 
tions of food, climate, and training, than now. There are 
in existence comparatively few coats of armor which a 
modern English or American regiment could wear. Very 
few moderns could wield the ancient swords, not because 
the weapons are too heavy, but because the hilts are too 
small for their hands. The mummies of the ancient 
Egyptian conquerors are no larger than the modern 
Egyptians, and are not so large as modern Englishmen. 
The feats of modern pedestrians and acrobats surpass 
anything recorded of ancient times. Leander swam the 
Hellespont, but Captain Webb swam the British channel. 
Milo lifted an ox, but Mr. Winship lifted more than 3,000 
pounds. Under improved conditions of living, human life 
is longer than it was three thousand years ago. Much is 
said of the physical deterioration of modern American 
women. Doubtless our climate is not especially favora- 
ble to health, but I have never seen any evidence that our 
great-grandmothers were stronger or longer-lived than the 
present generation of women. If portraiture and tomb- 
stones are trustworthy, it was much the same then as now, 
and it must not be forgotten that our female ancestors 
had few stairs to climb. 

Let us not vex our souls with any imaginings upon the 
so-called Darwinian theory. If any man feels it in his 
bones that he is descended from an ape, I have no quar- 
rel with him. He is at liberty to figure his ancestors in 
his own way. For my own part I cannot believe that 
monkeys ever inhabited my family tree. It hardly fol- 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 27 

lows, because some men can wriggle their scalps and move 
their ears, that all men were once baboons. It is true 
that in the human frame there is a good place for a tail, 
but as we have never found any tail there, we are con- 
tent to believe that men never carried that superfluous 
member. Such a theory is quite consistent in those na- 
tions who worship the ape, but it will hardly answer for 
those who profess to believe that " God created man in 
his own image," and " a little lower than the angels." 

Finally, the iconoclast is striving to shatter our faith in 
God and Christ. We have not time to speak at length 
of the revival of religious scepticism during the last quar- 
ter of a century, nor to review the time-worn arguments 
pro and con. It seems to me, however, that the sceptics 
are " too superstitious," like the men of Athens in the 
Apostle's day. Take, for example, Renan. Polished, 
reverent, even spiritual, he has every name of praise for 
Christ save one, but he makes of Him who brought life 
and immortality to light, so far as His claims to divinity 
are concerned, an unconscious and involuntary impostor, 
self-deceived and deceiving others. His theory of the 
raising of Lazarus will answer for an example. He asks 
us to believe, that Lazarus being sick almost to death, his 
friends, without the knowledge of Christ, shut him living 
in the tomb, and caused Christ to appear to himself and 
to the uninitiated spectators, to work the miracle of rais- 
ing him from the dead ! 

In my opinion there is no credulity so great as that of 
religious unbelief. There are no men so doatingly credu- 
lous as the great lights of modern science, who strain at a 
gnat and swallow a camel. When I was a boy I possessed 
a copy of Mother Goose's Melodies, with a picture of the 



MM^M. 



28 ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 

" three wise men of Gotham " who " went to sea in a 
bowl ; " one of them paddling with a sieve, another look- 
ing at the man in the moon through a telescope, and the 
third trying to bring him down with a pop-gun. So the 
modern wise men, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndal, have pad- 
dled out on the great sea of nature in their bowl, and are 
trying to make out God's purposes with their petty spy- 
glasses, and to bring down the Almighty from his throne 
with their puny conjectures. Is it not easier to believe 
in an intelligent and personal God, and in a rational read- 
ing of the Mosaic account of creation, and the miracles 
of Christ, and the Christian scheme of salvation, and in 
heaven, than in protoplasm and evolution, and the poten- 
tiality of matter and non-existence after death? It is 
not the Christians, but the scientists who are superstitious. 
But now, like Cato, we are " weary of conjecture." 
Shakespeare says : " What a piece of work is man ! how 
noble in reason ! how infinite in faculties ! in form and 
moving, how express and admirable ! in action, how like 
an angel ! in apprehension, how like a God ! " But we 
have seen how feeble a creature is man, in spite of his 
boasted powers. How little we really know ! The goal 
of knowledge is forever receding. The lamp of conject- 
ure sheds but a feeble ray to illuminate the illimitable 
unknown. We move in doubt and darkness. Man beats 
against the limitations of time and space like a bird 
against the bars of its cage. The phenomena of nature 
are beyond our ken as well as beyond our control. What 
do we know of the tides, the aurora, the thunder and 
lightning, of meteors and meteoric stones, of volcanoes, of 
tidal waves, of cyclones, pestilence, famine and drought ? 
How feeble are man's struggles against the dread forces 



ICONOCLASM AND WHITEWASH. 29 

of nature ! We send our great ships upon the ocean and 
they are never heard of ; the earthquake swallows up and 
the tornado overwhelms proud cities. If we endeavor to 
enslave these forces they rebel with dreadful effect. How 
sceptical is man of nature's bounty ! Even now he is 
conjecturing how long her wood and coal will last, and 
what he shall do when they are exhausted. How really 
ignorant is man of the nature of the commonest things ! 
Color — is it a positive attribute or only the gift of light ? 
Is the violet blue in the dark? No one really knows, and 
wise men are conjecturing. The scene of man's temporal 
home is not fully explored; many have left their bones 
amid the ice of the pole ; the sources of the Nile have 
only just been discovered ; the marvellous empire of 
China is scarcely yet known. Many of the problems of 
history still escape solution ; — who was the man in the 
iron mask ? The site of Troy, discovered, if at all, only 
yesterday, serves mainly to show that the ancient city 
was built upon the ruins of one still older, of which we 
know nothing. We are not sure of the alleged facts of 
history ; the iconoclasm of modern investigation has de- 
stroyed many historic idols. We are not certain even of 
the events of the last twenty years in our own country. 
We hardly know whether to credit alleged events strictly 
contemporaneous. Our science, how imperfect and short- 
sighted ! The law — uncertain and contradictory. Medi- 
cine — empirical and experimental. We cannot even fore- 
tell the weather with any accuracy. What do we know 
of the future duration of the circumstances of this time ? 
For example, the Catholic Church — is it in its decadence 
or not ? Mr. Lecky, in a passage of great eloquence, de- 
clares that it " is no longer a living organism ; its signifi- 



30 ICON OCL ASM AND WHITEWASH. 

cance is but the significance of death." On the other 
hand, Macaulay depicts that church as likely to be in full 
vigor and prosperity when a traveller from New Zealand 
shall take his seat upon a broken arch of London Bridge 
to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. How little does a man 
know of his own individual history ! let him try to trace 
his genealogy. What do we know of the great mystery 
of life and death ? One has conjectured that the dead are 
the truly living, and that men and women are but ghosts. 
The essence of the modern science seems to be that man 
is an ameliorated ape, God is a law of matter, and the 
future is a blank. Man thirsts for knowledge, but how 
short his time for learning ! 

" Nor will life's stream for observation stay, 
It hurries all too fast to mark their way ; 
In vain sedate reflections we would make, 
When half our knowledge we must snatch, not take. " 

An old writer has conjectured that if a man's will were 
strong enough he need never die. This reminds one of 
Wordsworth, who said to Lamb that Shakespeare was 
greatly overrated, and that he could write just like Shake- 
speare if he had a mind. " Yes," replied Lamb, " if you 
had the mind." And so the old writer sighed, " Man doth 
not yield himself unto the angels, nor unto death utterly, 
save only through the weakness of his feeble will." There 
is a stronger will than ours, a greater knowledge than 
ours ; and poor human nature will aspire and struggle 
and hope and conjecture through its petty day, until it 
shall yield to that will, and then perchance it may acquire 
that knowledge. Our conjectures will be solved only 
when we cease to conjecture. Then shall we know even 
as we are known. 



BIBLIOMANIA. 



Of all the desires that from time to time have taken 
possession of the souls of men, none has been more en- 
grossing and enduring than the hobby of collecting books. 
Other passions have had their day. The Dutch tulip craze 
raged fearfully while it lasted, but was of ephemeral dura- 
tion ; postage-stamps, autographs, clocks, pipes, and walk- 
ing-sticks seem declining in interest ; mulberries have long 
since gone to seed ; the cackle of fancy hens is scarcely 
heard; numismatic madness has faded away with the 
Pillars of Hercules ; china, pottery, rugs, bric-a-brac, are 
having their little day ; but Bibliomania, after a period of 
comparative inaction, is now breaking afresh into that 
feverish extravagance which marked its prevalence more 
than half a century ago. 

Certainly there is no pursuit in which the fancy takes 
wider or more diverse ranges, or in which more reckless 
expenditure is incurred ; and it is equally certain that no 
outlay is regarded by the world at large as quite so foolish 
and unremunerative as that in books. A rich man fills 
his stables with horses at fabulous prices, and a stock- 
breeder pays $30,000 for some cow with a royal name, and 
nobody thinks these things strange. But when a gentle- 
man of literary tastes expends $17,000 for a copy of the 
Mazarine Bible, the first printed book, as happened a few 



32 BIBLIOMANIA. 



years ago in England, the other gentlemen, whose tastes 
incline to natural history, regard him as a lunatic. Why, 
it is difficult to say. Blood-stock may die to-morrow, cer- 
tainly will die some time, and their remains are worth no 
more than those of the plebeian kind ; while a rare book, 
with proper care, will outlast the life of empires and grow 
more valuable every day. 

Book collectors, in the true sense of the term, are 
never agreed except in one particular: they all value 
the outside more than the inside; they regard the vol- 
ume more as merchandise than as a vehicle of thought. 
It is the paper, type, ink, binding, date, and publisher, 
rather than the contents, that are the criterions of desira- 
bility. 

One Bibliomaniac once said of another: " He knows 
nothing at all of books, I assure you, unless perhaps of 
their insides." And in one of the dialogues of Dibdin's 
Bibliomania, " I will frankly confess," rejoined Lysander, 
" that I am an arrant Bibliomaniac — that I love books 

dearly — that the very sight, touch, and mere perusal " 

" Hold, my friend," again exclaimed Philemon, " you have 
renounced your profession — you talk of reading books — 
do Bibliomaniacs ever read books?" There is one class 
who buy solely on account of the paper ; of these, one 
collects only books on thick paper, another only those on 
thin ; one acquires only those of ample margins, or techni- 
cally speaking, large paper ; one prefers coarse, another 
fine, one drawing, another India paper ; while the ne plus 
ultra in this direction is vellum. 

Another class prize the book only on account of its 
binding; of these, one dotes on full-bound books, with 
gilt edges, while another tolerates nothing but half-bind- 



BIBLIOMANIA. 33 



ing, gilt tops, and rough or uncut edges ; and another 
and very slovenly species care nothing for the leather, 
provided only the edges of the leaves are untrimmed. 
Another genus look only to the name of the binder, and 
still another to that of the publisher ; to the first, a tome 
clothed by Bedford, Cap6, or Matthews, and the latter, a 
volume printed by Aldus, Elzevir, Pickering, or " the 
Riverside," has peculiar charms. One person seeks only 
ancient books ; another those of limited editions ; another 
those privately printed ; a fourth wants nothing but pres- 
entation copies ; yet another only those which have be- 
longed to famous men ; and still another illustrated or 
illuminated books. There is a perfectly rabid and incur- 
able class, of whom the most harmless are devoted to 
pamphlets ; another, rather more dangerous, to incorrect, 
or suppressed editions ; and a third, stark mad, to play- 
bills and portraits. One man affects folios, another 
searches for bijou editions, and another, quite sensible, 
will tolerate neither folio nor quarto. Another class, es- 
pecially rabid, accept mainly nothing but first editions, 
technically known as principes ; or sometimes only fif- 
teeners, alias incunabula — that is, books printed in the fif- 
teenth century, the first century of printing. Others, 
styled Rubricists, have a rage for books with the contents 
and marginal references printed in red ink. One patron- 
izes the drama, one poetry, one the fine arts ; another 
books about books and their collectors ; and a very re- 
cherche class devote themselves to works on playing-cards, 
angling, magic, or chess, or the jest-books and facetice. 
We have reserved for last mention those unhappy beings 
who run up and down for duplicates, searching for every 
edition of their favorite authors. Of course tastes differ 
3 



34 BIBLIOMANIA. 



as to the size of the collection. One seeks to form a 
small and select library, another a large and comprehen- 
sive collection. Among the latter was Richard Heber, 
who possessed a collection whose numbers could not be 
expressed in less than six figures, holding that one needed 
three copies of every book — one for use, one for show, 
and another to lend his friends. Finally, the struggle 
among all these persons always is to get something 
that no one else has acquired, which is then called 
unique; or to procure a more sumptuous copy than his 
neighbor's. 

The mania for book collecting is by no means a modern 
disease, but has existed ever since there were books to 
gather, and has infected many of the wisest and most 
potent names in history. Euripides is ridiculed by 
Aristophanes in The Frogs for collecting books. Of the 
Roman emperor Gordian, who flourished (or rather did 
not flourish, because he was slain after a reign of thirty- 
six days) in the third century, Gibbon says, " twenty-two 
acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thou- 
sand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations, and 
from the productions which he left behind him it appears 
that the former, as well as the latter, were designed for use 
rather than for ostentation." This combination of ux- 
orious and literary tastes seems to have existed in another 
monarch of a later period — Henry VIII. — the seeming 
disproportion of whose expenditure of £10,800 for jewels 
in three years, during which he spent but £100 for books 
and binding, is explained by the fact that he was indebted 
for the contents of his libraries to the plunder of monas- 
teries. Cicero, who possessed a superb library, especially 
rich in Greek, at his villa in Tusculum, thus describes 



BIBLIOMANIA. 35 



his favorite property : " Books to quicken the intelligence 
of youth, delight age, decorate prosperity, shelter and 
solace us in adversity, bring enjoyment at home, befriend 
us out-of-doors, pass the night with us, travel with us, go 
into the country with us." 

Petrarch, who collected books not simply for his own 
gratification, but aspired to become the founder of a per- 
manent library at Venice, gave his books to the Church of 
St. Mark ; but the greater part of them perished through 
neglect, and only a small part remains, which may now be 
seen. Boccaccio, anticipating an early death, offered his 
library to Petrarch, his dear friend, on his own terms, to 
insure its preservation, and the poet promised to care for 
the collection in case he survived Boccaccio ; but the lat- 
ter, outliving Petrarch, bequeathed his books to the 
Augustinians of Florence, and some of them are still 
shown to visitors in the Laurentinian Library. From 
Boccaccio's own account of his collection, we must believe 
his books quite inappropriate for a monastic library, and 
the good monks probably instituted an auto da ft for most 
of them, like that which befell the knightly romances in 
Don Quixote. Perhaps the naughty story-teller intended 
the donation as a covert satire. The walls of the room 
which formerly contained Montaigne's books, and is at 
this day exhibited to pilgrims, are covered with inscrip- 
tions burnt in with branding-irons on the beams and raf- 
ters by the eccentric and delightful essayist. The author 
of Ivanhoe adorned his magnificent library with suits of 
superb armor, and luxuriated in demonology and witch- 
craft. The caustic Swift was in the habit of annotating 
his books, and writing on the fly-leaves a summary opin- 
ion of the author's merits; whatever else he had, he 



36 BIBLIOMANIA. 



owned no Shakespeare, nor can any reference to him be 
found in the nineteen volumes of his works. Military 
men seem always to have had a passion for books. To 
say nothing of the literary and rhetorical tastes of Caesar, 
" the foremost man of all time," Frederick the Great had 
libraries at Sans Souci, Potsdam, and Berlin, in which he 
arranged the volumes by classes without regard to size. 
Thick volumes he rebound in sections for more convenient 
use, and his favorite French authors he sometimes caused 
to be reprinted in compact editions to his taste. The 
great Conde inherited a valuable library from his father, 
and enlarged and loved it. The hard-fighting Junot .had 
a vellum library which sold in London for ;£ 1,400, while 
his great master was not too busy in conquering Europe 
not only to solace himself in his permanent libraries, and 
in books which he carried with him in his expeditions, but 
to project and actually commence the printing of a camp 
library of duodecimo volumes, without margins, and in 
thin covers, to embrace some three thousand volumes, 
and which he had designed to complete in six years by 
employing one hundred and twenty compositors and 
twenty-five editors, at an outlay of about £163,000. St. 
Helena destroyed this scheme. It is curious to note that 
Napoleon despised Voltaire as heartily as Frederick ad- 
mired him, and gave Fielding and Le Sage places among 
his travelling companions ; while the Bibliomaniac appears 
in his direction to his librarian : " I will have fine editions 
and handsome bindings. I am rich enough for that." 
The main thing that shakes one's confidence in the cor- 
rectness of his literary taste is that he was fond of 
Ossian. 
Southey brought together fourteen thousand volumes, 



BIBLIOMANIA. Z7 



the most valuable collection which had up to that time 
been acquired by a man whose means and estate lay, as 
he once said of himself, in his inkstand. Time fails us to 
speak of Erasmus, De Thou, Grotius, Goethe, Bodley, 
Hans Sloane, whose private library of fifty thousand vol- 
umes was the beginning of that of the British Museum ; 
the Cardinal Borromeo, who founded the Ambrosian 
Library at Milan with his own forty thousand volumes, 
and the other great names entitled to the description of 
Bibliomaniac. We must not forget, however, Sir Richard 
Whittington, of feline fame, who gave ^"400 to found the 
library of Christ's Hospital, London. The fair sex, good, 
bad, and indifferent, have been lovers of books or founders 
of libraries ; witness the distinguished names of Lady 
Jane Gray, Catherine de Medicis, and Diane de Poictiers. 
It only remains to speak of the great opium-eater, who 
was a sort of literary ghoul, famed for borrowing books 
and never returning them, and whose library was thus 
made up of the enforced contributions of friends — for who 
would have dared refuse the loan of a book to Thomas de 
Quincey ? The name of the unhappy man would have 
descended to us with that of the incendiary of the Temple 
of Diana at Ephesus. But the great Thomas was reck- 
lessly careless and slovenly in his use of books ; and Bur- 
ton, in the Book-hunter, tells us that " he once gave in 
copy written on the edges of a tall octavo Somnium Scipi- 
onis, and as he did not obliterate the original matter, the 
printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble be- 
tween the letter-press Latin and the manuscript English." 
We seriously fear that with him must be ranked the 
gentle Elia, who said : " A book reads the better which is 
our own, and has been so long known to us that we know 



38 BIBLIOMANIA. 



the topography of its blots and dog's-ears, and can trace 
the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muf- 
fins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum." And 
yet a great degree of slovenliness may be excused in 
Charles, because, according to Leigh Hunt, he once gave a 
kiss to an old folio Chapman's Homer, and when asked 
how he knew his books one from the other, for hardly any 
were lettered, he answered : " How does a shepherd know 
his sheep ? " The love of books displayed by the sensual 
Henry and the pugnacious Junot is not more remarkable 
than that of the epicurean and sumptuous Lucullus, to 
whom Pompey, when sick, having been directed by his 
physician to eat a thrush for dinner, and learning from his 
servants that in summer-time thrushes were not to be 
found anywhere but in Lucullus' fattening coops, refused 
to be indebted for his meal, observing: "So if Lucullus 
had not been an epicure, Pompey had not lived." Of him 
the veracious Plutarch says : " His furnishing a library, 
however, deserved praise and record, for he collected very 
many and choice manuscripts ; and the use they were put 
to was even more magnificent than the purchase, the 
library being always open, and the walks and reading- 
rooms about it free to all Greeks, whose delight it was to 
leave their other occupations and hasten thither as to the 
habitation of the Muses." 

Hear the gentle Elia on this topic : " Rummaging over 
the contents of an old stall, at a half book, half old iron 
shop in Ninety-four alley, leading from Wardour street to 
Soho, yesterday, I lit upon a ragged duodecimo, which 
had been the strange delight of my infancy ; the price de- 
manded was sixpence, which the owner (a little squab 
duodecimo of a character himself) enforced with the assur- 



BIBLIOMANIA. 39 



ance that his own mother should not have it for a far- 
thing less. On my demurring to this extraordinary as- 
sertion, the dirty little vender reinforced his assertion 
with a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occa- 
sion demanded. ' And now,' said he, ' I have put my 
soul to it.' Pressed by so solemn an asseveration, I could 
no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me, how- 
ever unworthy, upon a level with his nearest relations; 
and depositing a tester, I bore away the battered prize in 
triumph." 

Bindings occupy the same relation to books that cloth- 
ing does to the human body, except that the clothing of 
books does not change until worn out, and looks the bet- 
ter for being old-fashioned. There is the same temptation 
toward gaudiness and extravagance in the one case as in 
the other. Charles Lamb had some sensible ideas on 
bindings. " To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the 
desideratum of a volume ; magnificence comes after. This, 
when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished on all kinds 
of books indiscriminately ; I would not dress a set of maga- 
zines, for instance, in full suit ; the dishabille, or half bind- 
ing (with Russia backs ever) is our custom. A Shakespeare 
or a Milton (unless the first editions) it were mere foppery 
to trick out in gay apparel ; the possession of them con- 
fers no distinction. The exterior of them (the things 
themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no 
ticklish sense of property in the owner. Thompson's 
Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and 
dog's-eared. In some respects, the better a book is the 
less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, 
and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes 
— great Nature's stereotypes — we see them individually 



40 BIBLIOMANIA. 



perish with less regret, because we know the copies of 
them to be ' eterne.' But where we know that a book is 
at once both good and rare — where the individual is 
almost the species, and when that perishes, 

" ' We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine ; ' 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of New- 
castle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing 
sufficiently durable, to honor and keep safe such a jewel. 
Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem 
hopeless ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers 
such as Sir Philip Sidney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his 
prose works, Fuller — of whom we have reprints, yet the 
books themselves, though they go about and are talked of 
here and there, we know, have not endenizened them- 
selves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as 
to become stock books — it is good to possess these in 
costly and durable covers. 

" To view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed 
encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in 
an array of Russia or morocco, when a tithe of that good 
leather would comfortably reclothe my shivering folios, 
would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Ray- 
mond Lully to look like himself again in the world — I 
never see these impostors but I long to strip them and 
warm my ragged veterans in their spoils." 

Leigh Hunt, too, held similar views : " I confess my 
weakness in liking to see some of my favorite purchases 
neatly bound. For most of these I like a good plain old 
binding, never mind how old, provided it wears well ; but 
my Arabian Nights may be bound in as fine and flowery 



BIBLIOMANIA. 41 



a style as possible, and I should love an engraving to 
every dozen pages." 

Here then we have the true theory of binding books ; 
good and rare books deserve a costly dress, none beside. 

One may find precedents on either side of the question 
of rich binding, for Adam Smith was a dandy, and Dr. 
Bethune a sloven, in respect of this matter. 

In view of the whimsicalities of Bibliomaniacs it has 
occurred to me that it would be useful to endeavor to 
render the binding of books suggestive of the contents. 
Thus, as to colors : one might appropriately dress military 
treatises in red, theological in blue, gastronomical in claret 
or salmon ; books on magic in black, and a history of 
pugilism in blue-black ; instructions for actors and singers 
in yellow, and guide-books and travels in orange. Again : 
one might bind Lamb in pea-green ; the History of the 
Friends in drab; of the Popes in scarlet, and Cicero de 
Senectute in gray ; while Magna Charta should always be 
preserved in violet. When one considers materials, he 
naturally looks for an account of the Crimean war in 
Russia, a history of the Barbary States in morocco, ac- 
counts of intestine convulsions in vellum, works on arbor- 
iculture in tree-calf, Bacon in hog-skin, biographies of 
celebrated women in muslin, statistics of the lumber 
trade in boards, a description of Saxony in sheep, and 
all love tales in plain calf with clasps. One's collection 
of criminal trials should be in full gilt, and accounts of 
famous sculptors in marbled sides and edges. Any his- 
tory of the Baptists should not have sprinkled edges. All 
books relating to those of defective vision should be blind- 
tooled. Books about the deaf and dumb should be in 
quiet colors. Of course, books on similar subjects should 



42 BIBLIOMANIA. 



be similarly bound ; for example, a description of Noah's 
Ark and the art of preserving pears; the Complete Angler 
and a geometry ; a demonology and a spelling-book ; the 
Curtain Lectures and a history of the gunpowder plot ; 
statistics of the fever and ague and a history of earth- 
quakes, and so on. . 

Time will not suffice to speak in detail of the Biblioma- 
niacs who reprint rare books from their own libraries in 
editions of limited numbers ; of authors, like Walpole, who 
print their own works, and whose fame as printers is better 
deserved than their reputation as writers ; of novelists, like 
Thackeray, who design the illustrations for their own ro- 
mances ; of illustrators who pull to pieces dozens of books 
for the pictures, in order to insert them in some favorite vol- 
ume, whose text they serve to explain or depict ; of ama- 
teurs who bind their own books ; of lunatics who yearn for 
books wholly engraved, or printed only on one side of the 
leaf, or Greek books wholly in capitals, or others in the 
italic letter ; or black-letter fanciers ; or tall copy men ; or 
missal men — but we must give a word of praise to those 
who gather books on special subjects. These, provided 
the subjects of their labor are useful or interesting, may 
be regarded, like physicians who adopt specialities of 
practice, or scholars who illustrate peculiar branches of 
knowledge, as public benefactors. Thus, Shakespearian 
collections are of immense value and convenience to com- 
mentators and students of the great dramatist, and 'form 
their place of resort ; while classical libraries are the Mecca 
of scholars engaged in the solution of disputed linguistic 
questions. How much of early English poetry was pre- 
served by the exertions of antiquarians, delvers like Rit- 
son and Hazlewood, and found a safe repose on their 



BIBLIOMANIA. 43 



shelves ? And even if the subject is not necessarily use- 
ful or practical, it may yet serve for pleasant relaxation 
and harmless amusement. 

In nothing is the Bibliomaniac more plainly discernible 
than in his fastidious care of his books. The historian 
Prescott, it is recorded, "would often stop before the 
books, especially his favorite books, and be sure that they 
were all in their proper places, drawn up exactly to the 
front of their respective shelves, like soldiers on a dress 
parade, sometimes speaking of them, and almost to them, 
as if they were personal friends." 

Luxurious cases, with glass doors and cloth-lined shelves, 
cushioned tables, print-stands, and outer morocco cases for 
specially gorgeous volumes, all attest the bookman's ten- 
derness for his adopted children. How the wretched man 
suffers at seeing a favorite volume in the clutch of one 
unused to handling such wares, as a bachelor to dandling 
babies! How he groans when his pet's joints are cracked ; 
and when the visitor wets finger in mouth to turn the 
leaves, how the sweat runs off his brow ! For those bar- 
barians who lay a book down upon its face, or mark a 
place by turning down a leaf, or write notes upon the 
margins, or pull it down from its shelf by the foretop, 
rather than by indenting the books on each side, or cut 
open its leaves with the finger, or rub the palm of the 
hand over the smooth morocco — for all such there must 
be peculiar and terrific punishments in store in the future 
state. Let not a satirical smile light up the countenance 
of the unbeliever when the book-possessed draws forth a 
choice missal from its velvet envelope ; is not a rare book 
to be as well cared for as a meerschaum pipe ? 

From what has been said, it will be inferred that it 



44 BIBLIOMANIA. 



would be insane to expect a Bibliomaniac to lend a choice 
volume, unless, like Heber and Grollier, he possessed a 
duplicate copy especially for that purpose. It was doubt- 
less to guard against thieves that the ancient books were 
chained up in the monasteries, but the practice was effect- 
ual also against borrowers. De Bury, in his Philobiblon, 
has a chapter entitled "A Provident Arrangement by 
which his Books may be lent to Strangers," in which the 
utmost leniency is to lend duplicate books upon ample se- 
curity. Not to adopt the harsh judgment of an ancient 
author, who says, "to lend a book is to lose it, and borrow- 
ing but a hypocritical pretence for stealing," we may con- 
clude, in a word, that to lend a book is like the Presidency 
of the United States, to be neither desired nor refused. 

Of a class but little more unconscientious than borrow- 
ers of books are book-thieves. Book-stealing is a trade, 
and its successful pursuit requires high literary qualifi- 
cation. We are not now speaking of infractions of honor 
and courtesy made possible by the absence of an inter- 
national copyright law, but of manual pilfering. Pos- 
sibly the offence should not be regarded as anything 
more than venial. Courts of law would perhaps pro- 
nounce it damnum absque injuria, upon the same reason- 
ing that the rape of the Sabine women has ever been leni- 
ently looked upon in history : the Romans needed wives, 
and so stole them. How much more judicious had they 
simply stolen books ! But inasmuch as human nature is 
fallible, a stranger visiting the Bibliomaniac's library must 
not feel offended by finding his entertainer at his elbow 
when he is rummaging among the small volumes, however 
much he may be left to himself when busy with the folios 
and quartos. 



BIBLIOMANIA. 45 



To constitute a Bibliomaniac in the true sense, the love 
of books must combine with a certain limitation of means 
for the gratification of the appetite. The consciousness 
of some extravagance must be always present in his mind ; 
there must be a sense of sacrifice in the attainment. In 
a rich man the disease cannot exist ; he cannot enter the 
kingdom of the Bibliomaniac's heaven. There is the same 
difference of sensation between the acquirement of books 
by a wealthy man and by him of slender purse, that there 
is between the taking of fish in a net and the successful 
result of a long angling pursuit after one especially fat and 
evasive trout. To haunt the book-stores ; there to see a 
long-desired work in luxurious and tempting style ; reluc- 
tantly to abandon it for the present on account of the 
price ; to go home and dream about it ; to wonder, for a 
year and perchance longer, whether it will ever again greet 
your eyes ; to conjecture what act of desperation you 
might in heat of passion commit toward some more affluent 
man in whose possession you should thereafter find it ; to 
see it turn up again in another book-shop, its charms 
slightly faded, but yet mellowed by age, like those of your 
first love, met in later life — with this difference, however, 
that whereas you crave those of the book more than ever, 
you are generally quite satisfied with yourself for not hav- 
ing, through the greenness of youth, yielded untimely to 
those of the lady ; to ask with assumed indifference the 
price, and learn with ill-dissembled joy that it is now 
within your means ; to say you'll take it ; to place it be- 
neath your arm, and pay for it (or more generally order it 
" charged ") ; to go forth from that room with feelings akin 
to those of Ulysses when he brought away the Palladium 
from Troy ; to keep a watchful eye on the parcel in the 



46 BIBLIOMANIA. 



car on your way home, or to gloat over the treasures of 
its pages, and wonder if the other passengers have any 
idea what a fortunate individual you are ; and finally to 
place the volume on your shelves, and thenceforth to call 
it your own — this is indeed a pleasure denied to the afflu- 
ent, so keen as to be akin to pain, and only marred by 
the palling which always follows possession, and the pres- 
entation of your bookseller's account three months after- 
ward. 

It is customary to ridicule the expenditure of money in 
books, beyond the few volumes " which no gentleman's 
library should be without," and which are usually the very 
books which any gentleman's library can best dispense 
with. The wise man will caution his book-loving friend 
against this vice, and at the same time knock the ashes 
from his cigar, not reflecting that he himself is burning up 
the price of a neat little library every year. Another sa- 
gacious adviser will give similar counsel, and at the same 
moment crack his whip over a thousand dollars' worth of 
horse-flesh, which is eating up large-paper and rich bind- 
ings at the rate of several hundred dollars annually. An- 
other of these comforters is an inveterate billiard-player, 
or is a member of a boat-club, or wastes his evenings at an 
idling club. The wife even will look sober when the ex- 
press-man stops at the door, and heave a sigh that agitates 
the husband's heart and a very brilliant set of diamonds 
on her own breast. Moneyed men hardly remark on these 
extravagances, but they deprecate any considerable expen- 
diture in books. Now it is a mere matter of taste, but a 
man is not lightly to be blamed for preferring to spend an 
evening in his book-room to yawning at a club, or being 
spattered with mud or snow behind a span of fast horses ; 



BIBLIOMANIA. 47 



or for investing a year's cigars and oats in a folio Ccesar 
or a wide-margined Dibdin, especially when he thus not 
only gratifies his hobby, but has his stores intact at the 
year's end. It must be said, too, in defence of the Biblio- 
maniac, that his habits are almost invariably praiseworthy 
and his morals irreproachable. While one is in company 
with Bacon and Shakespeare and Milton, he is in little 
danger of committing any undignified or immoral act. 

Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, quotes Heinsius 
as saying : "Ino sooner come into the library, but I bolt 
the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all 
such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of igno- 
rance, and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eter- 
nity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so 
lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great 
ones and rich men that know not this happiness." And 
Becatello wrote to Alphonso, King of Naples : " One 
thing I want to know of your prudence, whether I or 
Poggius have done best ; he, who that he might buy a 
country house near Florence, sold Livy, which he had writ 
in a very fair hand ; or I, who to purchase Livy have ex- 
posed a piece of land to sale ? " 

It is doubtless a good thing to be worth a million of 
dollars, although I confess I never tried the experiment ; 
but there are some things better than money. I would 
rather have the capacity and inclination to converse with 
Shakespeare and Dante, for example, than to have a 
million of dollars ; and in looking forward to the occupa- 
tions of the future life, I would rather fit myself to com- 
mune with such souls than with Crcesus and Midas. He 
was one of the wisest of mankind who said the only 
earthly immortality is in writing a book. 



48 BIBLIOMANIA. 



A miser having died, one said to the dead man's lawyer, 
" So old So-and-so is dead ? Did he leave much ? " " Oh, 
yes," was the reply ; " he left everything — didn't take any- 
thing with him." 

I would like to take something with me. 

It remains to add a few practical hints on the collecting 
and adornment of books. Usefulness in some sense ought 
always to be at the bottom of book-collecting — usefulness 
either in art or letters. Nobody ought to collect books 
merely to show them or say he has got them. Mrs. 
Potiphar had a library of standard authors in wood and 
leather, and lost the keys of the book-cases. That is a 
resource sufficient for a good many men, and even for 
some who have large and fine libraries. The fundamental 
rule is to buy only such books as you want to read, and to 
read more than once. A man does not sit down at table 
unless he wants to eat, and he should not purchase books 
unless he is hungry to read. Collecting books should 
spring from the feeling that one cannot get along without 
them. There are some books, however, that are useful as 
monuments of the arts of printing, engraving, illumination, 
and binding, and one is excusable for acquiring them for 
study in these respects, as well as for perusal. The books 
of the fifteenth century, the first century of printing, are 
mainly desirable in this view, although of course many of 
them are valuable to scholars, especially in the study of 
the classics. 

To a man who reads, the buying of one book entails 
the purchase of others. To instance my own experience, 
my first purchase was Prescott's Historical Works, at the 
age of eighteen. After reading Prescott, I felt that I 
must read Wilson's Conquest of Mexico, in which Prescott's 



BIBLIOMANIA. 49 



authorities and statements are seriously impugned. Pres- 
cott also necessitated the biography of Las Cases, and 
finally Squier's Peru. My early acquaintance with Pres- 
cott led me at length to " illustrate " a copy of his life by 
Ticknor. This, it seems to me, is the way in which libra- 
ries should originate and grow. One should buy books 
as he wants to use them. To take another example : it is 
impossible to read Ruskin's Modern Painters intelligently 
without constant access to the illustrated editions of 
Rogers' Italy and Poems, Turner's Liber Fluviorum, Camp- 
bell's Poems, Finden's Illustrations of the Bible, and of 
Byron's Life and Works, and the like. Therefore, when 
one gets Ruskin he must have these others. So a library 
should be like Topsy, not born, but should grow. Nothing 
more clearly stamps the hollowness of the pretensions 
that many people make of a love for books than two 
fashionable modern customs : one, to speak of a library as 
a room in a house without any books in it ; the other, to 
put the books into the front and most public room in the 
house, instead of a retired and quiet apartment where one 
can read and write. Mrs. Potiphar doubtless had her 
library in her reception-room. 

If one can afford it he should buy none but the very 
best editions at the start. Better, of course, have cheap 
editions, like the Tauchnitz, than none ; but there is health, 
comfort, and economy in the best. The largest type is 
the best for the eyes and the brain, and the best editions, 
even of standard common works, will always be worth 
some money. There really is no economy in cheap books 
to those who can afford better ones. Many people seem 
to have conscientious scruples against buying books unless 
they can get them for a song, and books bought in this 
4 



50 BIBLIOMANIA, 



way usually go in the same way, with a constant diminu- 
endo to the song. 

For ordinary private uses a good library need not ex- 
ceed one thousand or fifteen hundred volumes. If it does 
not exceed these bounds the owner may read it and know 
it. There is a great deal of sheer vanity and vulgar dis- 
play among book-collectors of wealth. I have been in 
many a superb private library whose owners knew little 
of books, except as merchandise. 

A few words, in conclusion, upon the adornment of 
books, which, inasmuch as I have already spoken of bind- 
ings, must be confined to " illustration." This consists in 
adding to the books engravings of portraits, scenes and 
characters, and drawings and autographs, descriptive or 
reminiscent of persons, places, and events alluded to in the 
text. There are tradesmen in the large cities who keep 
stocks of prints expressly for illustrators, and in London a 
number of these men issue frequent catalogues of their 
stocks. There are also a great many publications exclu- 
sively composed of portraits, views, and scenes, sometimes 
all pertaining to a single author, which it is not extrava- 
gant to buy for this purpose ; for example, Shakespearian 
illustrations ; Lodge's and Knight's and the " Physiog- 
nomical " portraits; Longhi's superb Italian portraits; 
Worlidge's " Engravings from Ancient Gems," and Wil 
liams' " Select Views in Greece ; " Finden's and Turner's 
views, of which I have spoken; Harding's "Views in 
Italy," and many others. If they are not all needed for 
the particular book in hand, they will " slop over " into 
some other. Thus " illustrating " breeds itself. Occa- 
sionally it is necessary to buy a book solely for a portrait 
or a view which it contains. One instance in my own ex- 



BIBLIOMANIA. 5 1 



perience, I recollect, was the very rare portrait of George 
Psalmanazar, the Formosa impostor, who deluded Dr. 
Johnson ; and another was George Barrington, the famous 
English pickpocket, who was transported and became 
Governor of New South Wales — of whom the saying 
was originally made, " he left his country for his country's 
good." 

As to the modus operandi, the first thing is to read your 
book. As you read it, make a list of the pictures it re- 
quires. If possible, get a copy in sheets, unbound, but if 
not, carefully take the book apart, and having procured 
the requisite pictures, lay them in at their proper places. 
If they are too large there is no resource, except the very 
extravagant one of having the pages mounted or " in- 
layed " to the necessary size. Sometimes special editions 
of limited numbers are printed on large paper for illustra- 
tion. If the pictures are too small they can be easily and 
cheaply " inlayed " to the proper size. This is an opera- 
tion of a good deal of nicety and rather beyond the skill 
of amateurs, but there are artisans in the large cities who 
do it. 

The hunt for pictures is sometimes very exciting and 
engrossing. There are two singular things about it. One 
is, the moment you have your book bound some rare pict- 
ure you wanted is sure to turn up. The other, when you 
find your rare print, you are pretty certain to find one or 
two duplicates; such prints, like accidents and crimes, 
seem to come in cycles. Some pictures which you would 
think quite common are difficult to get. For example, it 
was a longtime before I found a satisfactory "Bluebeard," 
and I have not yet got a " Lady Godiva." 

There are three modes of illustrating. Let me explain 



52 BIBLIOMANIA. 



the first and simplest by an example. In a memorial of 
Edward Everett, published by the Massachusetts Histori- 
cal Society, there is a passage quoted from Bulwer to the 
effect that the " love of mankind " may be called forth 
" by a Socrates to-day, by a Napoleon to-morrow ; while 
even a brigand chief, illustrious in the circle in which he 
moves, may command it no less powerfully than the gen- 
erous failings of a Byron, or the sublime excellencies of 
the greater Milton." Now for this passage I had a group 
of three busts of Socrates, the ugliest man of ancient 
times ; a rare picture of Napoleon at the bridge of Lodi, 
incorrectly representing him on horseback ; a group of five 
Byrons ; a Milton, and a portrait of Bulwer. In the same 
volume was a reference to Master Everett's teacher in 
penmanship, Master Tileston, and to the neat hand that 
the precocious lad acquired under his tuition ; to illustrate 
this I had the original manuscript of a school composition 
written by Everett, at the age of eleven, on the " Impor- 
tance of Public Education." The next method is to use, 
instead of a mere portrait, a representation of some 
famous event or incident in the life of the man whose 
name is mentioned. The Napoleon above-mentioned is 
an example of this. Suppose in the life of Titian you 
find an account of the Emperor Charles V. picking up the 
great artist's brush, which he had dropped; I should put 
in a picture of this incident. The third, and best mode, 
is the illustration of ideas, especially in poetry. For ex- 
ample, in the poem " To Ennui," in Halleck's Croakers, 
for the line, " The fiend, the fiend, is on me still ! " I found 
a picture of an imp, sitting on the breast of a man in bed 
with the gout. It took me years to find that. In the 
same stanza is the line, "Like a cruel cat that sucks a 



BIBLIOMANIA. 53 



child to death." I found for this a picture in a children's 
magazine of a cat on the breast of a child in a cradle. 
And speaking of cats reminds me of the line in another 
Croaker, " And like a tomcat die by inches." For this I 
had a picture of a cat caught by the paw in a steel trap. 
These are things it would be almost impossible to dupli- 
cate. But the best thing in the Croakers is an illustration, 
in the poem " To Simon," of the line, " Buy a new eye- 
glass and become a dandy and a gentleman." "Simon" 
was " a gentleman of color," the favorite pastry-cook of 
New York half a century ago. In my copy I had here 
inserted a print from La Fontaine, representing a gallantly 
dressed man viewing his figure in a mirror, and I had got 
a friend to blacken his face and hands in water-color, but 
he has no " eye-glass." I have been some years illustrat- 
ing another copy of' the same work, which is still unfin- 
ished, and for this passage I have now a fine print of a 
colored gentleman, dressed in "tights" and a ruffled shirt, 
viewing a lady of African descent through an eye-glass. 
It would be impossible to improve on that. I recollect I 
once wanted to illustrate the phrase," seeing the elephant," 
and found what I needed in a picture of Pyrrhus trying 
to frighten his captive, Fabricius, by suddenly drawing 
the curtains of his tent and showing him an elephant with 
trunk uplifted in a threatening attitude. I remember that 
the Roman general " didn't scare worth a cent." Among 
the hardest things to find were a tread-mill and a drum- 
major ; I got the latter out of Frank Leslie's newspaper at 
first, but finally I found a fine print after Detaille, and 
the former came from a pamphlet published many years 
ago on the proposed use of the tread-mill in our State 
prisons. I have also found apt illustrations for the follow- 



54 BIBLIOMANIA. 



ing queer subjects, all in the Croakers : " Korah, Dathan 
and Abiram ; " " Miss Atropos, shut up your scissors ; " 
"Albany's two steeples high in air ; " " Reading Cobbett's 
Register ; " " Bony in his prison isle ; " " Giant Wife ; " 
" Beauty and the Beast ; " " Fly Market ; " " Tammany 
Hall ; " " The dove from Noah's ark ; " " Rome Saved by 
Geese ; " " Caesar Offered a Crown ; " " Caesar Crossing 
the Rubicon;" " Dick Ricker's Bust;" "Sancho in his 
island reigning ; " " The wisest of wild fowl ; " " Rey- 
nold's Beer House;" "A Mummy;" "A Chimney 
Sweep ; " " The Arab's wind ; " " Pygmalion ; " " Danae ; " 
*' Highland chieftain with his tail on ; " " Nightmare ; " 
" Shaking Quakers ; " " Polony's Crazy Daughter ; " 
"Bubble Blowing;" "First Pair of Breeches;" " Ban- 
quo's Ghost ; " " Press Gang," etc. To illustrate those ideas 
requires a knowledge of history, biography, mythology, 
local topography, romance, the drama, and the Bible. 

Discrimination should be used in selecting a book for 
illustration. The book should not be a mere vehicle. It 
should be a favorite author, or a classic, or the life of a 
famous man, or a book peculiarly elegant in itself. Byron's 
Childe Harold, Walton's Complete Angler, Grimm's Life 
of Michael ' Angelo, are examples of proper subjects of illus- 
tration. But common and prosaic books, like histories, 
should not be adopted. 

What I have said in regard to books proper for illustra- 
tion is applicable to those which it is desirable to have in 
large paper. Only books intrinsically valuable for their 
artistic execution, or somewhat rare, or editions of a 
classic or favorite author, are appropriate in this form. To 
such the elegance of wide margins is a proper belonging. 
The " slender rivulet of text running between the wide 



BIBLIOMANIA. 55 



meadows of margin " is peculiarly grateful to the Biblio- 
maniac's senses. But the issuing of common histories, 
speeches, biographies, and such things, on large paper is 
ridiculous. A volume in large paper stands in the same 
relation to the rest of the edition that a proof engraving 
occupies toward the prints; it should be the earliest 
impression, struck off before the type or plates are worn. 
Otherwise it has no value, and issuing it is a mere trick of 
the trade. The most elegant books ever issued in this 
country in large paper, to my recollection, are the Boston 
editions of Walton's A ngler and Ticknor's Life of Pres- 
cott. Such issues are peculiarly fit for illustrations, as 
they accommodate prints of all sizes better than the small 
paper copies. 

Is there any use in this hobby ? — it may be asked. In 
answer, I may say, it keeps one out of mischief and culti- 
vates the taste. Moreover, it gives an exact knowledge of 
the book itself, and unconsciously teaches a great deal of 
biography, history, art, mythology, and the like. I do 
not know why one is not as well justified in thus adorning 
his books as in adorning his house or his stables. 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 



I DO not invite you to a learned philological or critical 
discourse. I have no pretensions for such an office. My 
purpose is rather to amuse my readers with some of the 
humors and absurdities of criticism on Shakespeare and 
his plays. While we owe much to judicious criticism for 
the correction of misprints, the emendation of obscure and 
incorrect passages, and the unfolding of hidden beauties in 
these immortal works, it must be confessed that the poet's 
critics have in many instances done their best to make him 
and themselves ridiculous, and not only have disguised his 
works, but have striven to unseat the man himself. In 
short, criticism on Shakespeare has run mad and beaten 
its own brains out. From this sweeping assertion I must 
except the celebrated English editor, Mr. Knight, and our 
own American scholars, Messrs. Verplanck, White, Hud- 
son, and Furness. The variorum edition, which the latter 
is now publishing, illustrates both sides of my subject, and 
should be at the hand of every man who loves and would 
know Shakespeare. 

But let us first inquire whether there was any Shake- 
speare, because if there was not it is of no use to spend 
our time on him. 

The most audacious of many modern attempts at his- 



58 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

torical iconoclasm is that which seeks to prove that the 
plays attributed to Shakespeare were not written by him, 
but probably by Lord Bacon. This conjecture would 
pull down from his throne the acknowledged sovereign 
of literature, and establish in his place the man who of all 
would have been the most incapable of writing these 
dramas. The theory, I believe, was originated by a lady 
of the name of Delia Bacon, but whether she conjectured 
herself to be descended from the rival whom she sets up 
against Shakespeare, I have no information. The craze 
of this most mad lady was adopted and advocated in a 
book of some six hundred infidel pages, by Mr. Nathaniel 
Holmes, of Missouri, who is said, I blush to relate, to be a 
lawyer and a judge, although it is evident he is no judge 
of Shakespeare. The whole contention rests on the as- 
sumption that it is impossible that a man of such slender 
attainments, as Shakespeare is known to have been, could 
have written these wise, profound, brilliant, and altogether 
unparalleled dramas. But just as it requires more credulity 
to disbelieve than to believe Christianity, so it is much 
more difficult to disbelieve than to believe Shakespeare's 
authorship. No theory resting in mere scepticism and 
denial can win its way or carry conviction. It is possible 
that the assignment of the plays to Bacon is intended as 
a posthumous compensation for the detriment which his 
moral character has suffered. But it will not atone for 
his moral delinquencies, and his intellectual reputation 
needs no enhancement. 

As to the evidence, the arguments adduced to support 
the theory are of the flimsiest, extravagant, far-fetched, 
and laughably puerile description — such as a sensible man 
might use in his dreams, but only such stuff as dreams are 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 59 

made of. To these credulous persons trifles light as air 
prove confirmation strong as holy writ. For example, 
Shakespeare's manuscript contains few alterations or 
erasures ; consequently he must have copied from Bacon's ! 
So some poet, in returning something lent him by Bacon, 
accompanied it by some composition of his own, and re- 
marked that while he did not give as good as Bacon sent, 
yet he sent him " measure for measure ; " consequently, 
Bacon wrote Measure for Measure / This would seem 
better evidence that the borrower himself wrote it. These 
are fair examples of the arguments. On the other hand, 
Bacon never claimed the plays in his life, nor by any of 
his remains ; no contemporary can be shown ever to have 
suspected him as the author ; all contemporaries who 
speak assign them to Shakespeare ; and Bacon is the last 
man to whom they can be attributed, because they are 
entirely foreign to his style, as well in their glaring faults 
as in their magnificent beauties, and because to assign 
them to him in addition to his acknowledged works would 
argue him a more superhuman genius than Shakespeare, 
and vastly greater than any who has ever lived. If Bacon 
had written plays, would he have borrowed his plots, 
plagiarized some of his best lines and ideas, and committed 
gross anachronisms? Bacon left his reputation to the 
vindication of posterity. Does any calm man suppose he 
would not have left behind him a declaration of his 
authorship of these immortal works, if it had been his ? 
Granting that he may have been deterred from owning 
the plays in his lifetime on account of the disrepute of 
the occupation of a playwright, this reason could not 
have weighed after his death. Moreover, the ambitious 
courtier would have been glad to read his plays to Eliza- 



60 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

beth as Shakespeare did, despite the unpopularity of the 
vocation. The humorist of the New York Times says: 
" It is as easy to show the falsity of the delusion as to the 
existence of the Chinese language as it was to demon- 
strate the mythical character of the legends upon which 
the Christian religion was founded." Upon reasoning 
similar to that on which Archbishop Whately based his 
demonstration of the non-existence of Napoleon, James 
Freeman Clarke has jestingly proved that Shakespeare not 
only never wrote, but never lived. He says : " How can 
Shakespeare have been a real person, when his very name 
is spelled in at least two different ways in manuscripts 
professing to be his own autograph? And when it is 
found in the manuscripts of the period spelled in every 
form and with every combination of letters which express 
its sound or the semblance thereof ? One writer of his 
time calls him Shakescene, showing plainly the mythical 
character of the name. His wife's name has also a myth- 
ical character, and is probably derived from his song 
commencing, ' Anne hath a way.' Again, if he were a 
real person living at London in the midst of writers, poets, 
actors, and other eminent men, is it credible that no 
allusion should have been made to him by most of them ? 
He was contemporary with Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Coke, 
Burleigh, Hooker, Henry IV. of France, Montaigne, Tasso, 
Cervantes, Galileo, Grotius ; and not one of them, al- 
though so many of them were voluminous writers, refers 
to any such person, and no allusion to any of them ap- 
pears in any of his plays. He is referred to, to be sure, 
with excessive admiration by the group of playwriters 
among whom he is supposed to have moved ; but as there 
is not in all his works the least allusion in return to any 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 6 1 

of them, we may presume that Shakespeare was a sort of 
nom de plume to which all anonymous plays were referred 
— a sort of dramatic John Doe. If such a man existed, 
why did not others, out of this circle, say something about 
his life and circumstances ? Milton was eight years old 
when Shakespeare died, and might have seen him, as he 
took pains to go and see Galileo, who was born in the 
same year with Shakespeare. Oliver Cromwell was seven- 
teen years old when Shakespeare died ; Descartes twenty 
years old ; Rubens, the painter, thirty-nine years old — 
none of these have heard of him, although Rubens resided 
in England and painted numerous portraits there. Again, 
many important events occurred in his supposed lifetime, 
to none of which he has alluded — as the battle of Lepanto, 
the St. Bartholomew massacre, the defeat of the Spanish 
Armada, the first circumnavigation of the globe, the gun- 
powder plot, the deliverance of Holland from Spain, the 
invention of the telescope and the discovery thereby of 
Jupiter's satellites. In an era of strenuous controversy 
between the Protestant and Roman religions, no one can 
tell from his works whether he was Catholic or Protestant. 
Unlike Dante, Milton, Goethe, he left no trace on the 
political or even social life of his time." His works dis- 
play such an unprecedented universality of knowledge in 
one man, that he has been conjectured to be pretty much 
everything — lawyer, physician, soldier, courtier, tailor. 
" In a time when others collected and published their 
works, no collected edition of his appeared until long 
after his death. Nothing that can be pronounced an 
authentic portrait of him has come down to us, and the 
effigies which we have are clearly of a formal and tradi- 
tional type, with their preposterous expanse of forehead." 



62 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

This is very fine reasoning, and by the same line of 
reasoning, if we admit that Shakespeare lived, we might 
prove that Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Coke, Burleigh, 
Hooker, Henry IV., Montaigne, Tasso, Cervantes, Gali- 
leo, Grotius, Milton, Cromwell, Descartes, and Rubens 
never lived, because Shakespeare says nothing of them. 
After all, such omissions are no more singular than that 
Thucydides has nothing to say of Socrates, his great con- 
temporary, nor that Plutarch, though the contemporary 
in his youth or in his old age of Persius, Juvenal, Lucan, 
and Seneca, of Quintillian, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, 
Pliny the Elder and the Younger, does not cite them, 
and in return his name is never mentioned by any Roman 
writer. 

The text of Shakespeare's plays has given rise to some 
very remarkable conjectural criticisms. The variorum 
edition is almost as good a jest-book as Joe Miller's. We 
might well exclaim, in the words of Madame Roland, 
slightly altered, "Oh, criticism, how many follies are uttered 
in thy name!" Once in a great while an important and sen- 
sible emendation is effected. Thus, in the description of 
Falstaff's death, the words " table of Greenfields " long 
stood as the pons asinorum of the commentators. The 
scholar who suggested " 'a babbled o' green fields," instead, 
conferred a boon on mankind. But what a narrow escape 
from a leap out of the pan into the fire ! Mr. Collier's 
folio would read, " on a table of green frieze," the passage 
then standing, " his nose was as sharp as a pen on a table 
of green frieze," which is quite a figure of upholstery. 
(Here let us observe that the conclusive argument in 
favor of the approved emendation seems to have escaped 
the attention of all the commentators until White. A 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 63 

mere reading of the passage suggests it : " For after I saw 
him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers, and 
smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one 
way : for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled d 
green fields." What more natural than to talk of green 
fields after playing with flowers?) It is hard to believe 
that Pope was serious when he conjectured that the words 
were a stage direction for a " supe," by the name of 
Greenfields, to bring in a table. 

Perhaps the most disputed passage in Shakespeare is 
" that runaways' eyes may wink," in Juliet's soliloquy, 
where she is longing for the approach of night and her 
husband, that " Romeo may leap to these arms untalked 
of and unseen." Who or what is "runaway?" Those 
commentators who preserve the word have different ex- 
planations, some supposing it to mean Cupid, a runaway 
from Venus, while others suppose it to mean the sun, 
Phaethon, the night, watchmen, or Juliet herself. Others 
think it means vagabonds or tramps. Others would 
read " enemies," " runagates," " unawares," " renomy's," 
"rumor's," " rumorers'," " roamers'," " roving, "" run- 
abouts'," " Luna's," " yonder," " runaway spies," " soon 
day's," " curious," " envious," " ribald," " Uranus'," " no 
man's," " Cynthia's," " sunny day's," " sun awake's," 
" sun away," " sun aweary," " rude day's," while one 
imaginative person, having the legend of Godiva in mind, 
would read, " no man's eyes may peep ; " and the climax 
is capped by one who, reading " runaways'," explains it 
by referring to boys who at night tie a cat or a dog to a 
door-knocker, and then run away. Here are thirty-three 
different explanations, and the conjectures cover twenty- 
eight large pages in fine type in Mr. Furness' new edition. 



64 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

A number of these conjectures may be easily set aside. 
The most ingenious one, Cupid, is disposed of by the re- 
flection that he is usually represented blind, and there- 
fore his eyes would always wink. In this very context 
Shakespeare speaks of " blind love ; " in Cymbeline he 
speaks of the images of two " winking Cupids," and he 
makes Mercutio speak of "Venus' purblind son and 
heir," and the " blind bow boy." If Cupid could see, 
then, as Mr. White observes, the marriage night would be 
the very occasion when he would be, and would be desired 
to be, wide-awake. No inanimate object will answer, be- 
cause Romeo's coming was thus to be " untalked of " as 
well as " unseen." " Enemies' eyes " will not serve, 
because friends' eyes would be just as objectionable. 
Juliet would certainly not have wished her own eyes to 
wink on this occasion. There is some plausibility in call- 
ing watchmen " runaways," judging from the standard of 
the modern police. " Unawares " would answer, but is 
inferior in beauty to " Rumor's eyes," especially when it 
is remembered that Virgil depicts Rumor with as many 
eyes and tongues as feathers. 

Or take the passage in Cymbeline, where Imogen is 
excusing her husband's injustice to her, and says, " some 
jay of Italy, whose mother was her painting, hath be- 
trayed him." We have had, instead of this, " who smothers 
her with painting ; " " whose feather was her painting ; " 
and " whose muffler was her painting." All agree that by 
" jay " is intended a courtesan, and it seems to me that the 
poet simply meant to say," whose mother was just like her." 

The scholar who shall suggest a better reading for either 
of these passages will earn the solid gratitude of all stu- 
dents of literature. 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 65 

Another passage upon which a great deal of gratuitous 
stupidity has been bestowed is the famous passage in 
Macbeth, " withered murder * * * with his stealthy 
pace, with Tarquin's ravishing strides, moves like a 
ghost." Nothing can be more felicitous than this de- 
scription of the long, eager, stealthy steps with which 
the murderer or ravisher steals upon his victim. The 
word " strides " originally stood " sides," and the emenda- 
tion is Pope's. Rowe, Malone, and Knight, however, 
preserve " sides." Knight says it is a verb meaning to 
match, to balance; that "ravishing " is a noun ; and that 
the meaning is, murder, with his stealthy pace, matches 
Tarquin's ravishing. Dr. Johnson says a ravishing stride 
is an action of violence, incompatible with a stealthy pace, 
and he would read, " with Tarquin ravishing, slides," etc. 
A writer in the Gentleman 's Magazine says of this : "Mac- 
beth was treading on a boarded floor, up one pair of 
stairs, probably in a passage or lobby, which made a 
cracking noise, which obliged him, in his alarm, to take 
long and cautious steps. This granted, we may pretty 
safely adopt the word slides." Of course it immediately 
occurs to the reader that the castle probably had a stone 
floor, and a few lines further on Macbeth cautions the earth 
not to hear his steps, " for fear the very stones prate of 
my whereabouts." White says, " Pope's emendation will 
seem happy to every cautious person who has stepped 
through a sick-chamber, or any apartment in which there 
were sleepers whom he did not wish to wake, and who 
remembers how he did it. 

Again, where Macbeth says the blood on his hand 
would "the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the 
green one red," some have related "one" to "green," 
5 



66 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

and made the passage stand, " making the green-one 
red." It is to be remarked that the poet has just spoken 
of " seas " in the plural, and of course he would not 
speak of them in the next line in the singular. The idea 
is plain — making the multitudinous green seas one red. 
Staunton finds it necessary to read, " making the green 
zone red. " 

So where Macbeth defies Banquds ghost, he says, " if 
trembling I inhabit then, protest me the baby of a girl." 
" Inhabit " has disturbed the commentators. Most of 
those who accept it, read it in the sense of " stay within- 
doors." Others suggest " inhibit," " inherit," " exhibit," 
" evitate," " evade it," " flinch at it," " I inhabit then," " I 
unknight me then." But Mr. White has hit the true 
sense of the word when he cites, " Oh Thou who inhabit- 
est the praises of Israel." 

Indeed, the amount of stupid and unnecessary criticism 
that is inflicted on our great poet is almost beyond belief. 
For instance, in respect to the passage in Romeo and 
Juliet, where Nurse, calling for Juliet, says, " What lamb ! 
what lady-bird ! God forbid ! Where's this girl ? " so sen- 
sible an editor as Staunton remarks on the words " lady- 
bird," that they were a term applied to women of light 
and indelicate behavior, and that Nurse, remembering 
this, suddenly checks herself, and exclaims, " God forbid " 
— that I should apply such a name to my charge! Here- 
upon, Mr. Dyce deems it necessary to remark, " Staunton 
is certainly wrong," and to explain that the meaning is, 
"God forbid" that anything should have happened to 
Juliet. One hardly knows which the more to admire, the 
folly of Staunton or the simplicity of Dyce. If I could 
be permitted a suggestion, I would say that the refer- 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 67 

ence was unquestionably to the popular Mother Goose 
melody : 

" Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, 
Thy house is on fire, thy children will burn." 

Nurse meant " God forbid " that any such bad fortune 
should come to Juliet, as the incremation of her palace 
and the contingent young Capulets with which it might 
be stocked. This now is something like. 

Or take Lord Campbell in his conjectural pamphlet on 
the question whether Shakespeare was a lawyer, in which 
he comes to the conclusion that there is a good deal to 
be said on both sides, and very little certain on either. 
Among the arguments in favor of the affirmative, his lord- 
ship adduces the lines : 

" But my kisses bring again 
Seals of love, but sealed 'in vain." 

If this sort of seals were now in vogue among the legal 
profession, a seal would probably be deemed necessary 
for every conceivable legal document, and consequently 
there would be even more lip-service among lawyers than 
at present. 

Among the conjectures concerning the occupation of 
Shakespeare before he became a player, none is more en- 
tertaining than that of Steevens, founded on the passage : 

" There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

The commentator is alluding to the trade of Shake- 
speare's father as a wool dealer or butcher, and conject- 
ures that the poet followed the same business before he 



68 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

came up to London. He first gives the passage in sup- 
port of this theory, and then proceeds : " Dr. Farmer in- 
forms me that these words are merely technical. A 
woolman, butcher, and dealer in skewers" — and he em- 
phasizes the point by the aid of italics — " lately observed 
to him that his nephew, an idle lad, could only assist in 
making them — 'he could rough-hew them, but I was 
obliged to shape their gids.' Whoever recollects the pro- 
fession of Shakespeare's father, will admit that his son 
might be no stranger to such a term. I have seen pack- 
ages of wool pinned up with skewers." It has always 
seemed to me a mystery how Shakespeare's spirit could 
wait for Steevens to die a natural death after writing 
that. Perhaps the poet thought that it was one of the 
decrees of Providence that poets are always to be mis- 
understood, and that the passage in question might fitly 
be read thus : 

' ' There's a divinity that shapes our ends 
Rough, hew them how we will." 

These specimens encourage us to look a little further 
into the miscarrying labors of Shakespeare's editors and 
commentators. One of the choicest of these gentlemen 
is Becket, who might have been served as Henry treated 
his great namesake, without any necessity for repentance. 
A few samples will suffice. "' Hamlet. Govern these vent- 
ages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your 
mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music' ' Vent- 
ages with your fingers and thumb,' I would read thus : ' Gov- 
ern these ventages and the umbo with your fingers,' etc. 
Umbo (Lat.), a knob, a button. The piece of brass at the end 
of a flute might very well be called a button." Oh, if one 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 69 

could stop such ventages as this with fingers and thumbs 
what a dispensation it would be ! But again : Hamlet in 
the grave with Laertes says : 

" Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself? 
Woo't drink up Esil? eat a crocodile?" 

On this Becket is thus delivered : " This proposition of 
Hamlet is too extravagant, too ridiculous to remain in 
the text. By such a reading the Danish prince appears 
to be a very Dragon of Wantley for voraciousness. I 
regulate the passage thus : 

' ' ' Woo't weep ? woo't drink ? woo't eat ? woo't fast ? woo't fight ? 
Woo't tear thyself ? — Ape, Esil, Crocodile ? ' 

' Up ' is misprinted for ' Ape,' ' Esel ' in old language is 
1 Ass.' " 

It may be well to command our faces long enough to 
remember that Esil was a common term for vinegar, and 
also might have been a corruption of Issel, one of the 
affluents of the Rhine. So much for Becket — " off with 
his head." 

We next call up Mr. Jackson — and there is no mistake 
about the latter syllable of his name, however much the 
reader may be inclined to doubt it after hearing some ex- 
amples of his powers. Take the speech of the clown in 
All's Well that Ends Well. Clown has been singing an old 
ballad about the scarcity of good women, and then ob- 
serves: "An we might have a good woman born but 
every blazing star, or at an earthquake, 'twould mend the 
lottery well ; a man may pluck his heart out ere he pluck 
one." Mr. Jackson says: " How can a woman be born? 



70 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

A female, when introduced into life, is an infant ; — the 
reading is highly injudicious, and the correction seems to 
have been made without reflecting on the incongruity 
which it produced. The old copy read : ' but oer every 
blazing star.' In my opinion, from the word on being 
badly formed, the compositor mistook it for ore. I 
read, ' an we might have a good woman, but on every 
blazing star or at an earthquake, etc' " We may dis- 
miss Mr. Jackson, with the injunction to study St. 
John's Gospel, chapter sixteenth, verse twenty-one : 
"But as soon as she is delivered of the child, she re- 
membereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is 
born into the world." 

But this same passage nearly proved too much even for 
Malone, who says : " ' ' Twould mend the lottery well.' 
This is surely a strange kind of phraseology. I have 
never met with any example of it in any of the contem- 
porary writers ; and if there were any proof that in the 
lotteries of Queen Elizabeth's time wheels were employed, 
I should be inclined to read — lottery wheel." If you are 
going to read wheel, why not go the whole figure, and 
read pottery wheel? This would make still greater non- 
sense, if possible. 

Again, look at this passage in Hamlet : 

" Marcellus. My good lord,— 
Hamlet. I am very glad to see you; good even, sir." 

The acute Jackson reads : 

"lam very glad to see you good; even, sir." 

That is, as Marcellus has just called him " good," he gets 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 7 1 

" even " with him by calling him " good." This is an odd 
way of getting even. 

Bishop Warburton may next amuse or annoy us. The 
bishop evinced the great variety of his knowledge in his 
commentary on this passage in King John : 

" O Lewis, stand fast ! the devil tempts thee here, 
In likeness of a new untrimmed bride." 

" Untrimmed," he says, " signifies unsteady. The term 
is taken from navigation." Perhaps the bishop found sup- 
port for his notion that a bride was a ship in Antonio's 
speech to Bassanio, where he laments the loss of his ships, 
and says, " My ships have all miscarried." But again : 

" One inch of delay is a South Sea of discovery. 

This is stark nonsense ! We must read off discovery." 
Dr. Johnson made this all right, however : " This sentence 
is rightly noted by the commentator as nonsense, but not 
so happily restored to sense. I read thus : ' One inch 
of delay is a South Sea. Discover, I prithee, tell me, 
etc.'" After this, who shall say that two heads are 
better than one ? This will do for Warburton — and for 
Johnson. 

One example will answer for the corrector of Mr. Col- 
lier's folio. Imogen says : 

" I have heard of riding wagers, 
"Where horses have been nimbler than the sands 
That run i' the clock's behalf." 

The corrector would read : 



72 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

" Nimbler than the sands 
That run i' the clocks, by half!" 

Of Mr. Monck Mason we get a taste in his commentary 
on the following passage in Anthony and Cleopatra : 

" Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, 
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, 
And made their bends adornings ; at the helm 
A seeming mermaid steers ; the silken tackle 
Swells with the touches of those flower-soft hands 
That yarely frame their office." 

Mr. Mason would read, " tended her i' the guise," and 
construe " their bends " to mean the graceful curves of 
their tails ! For this reading the letter b would seem 
superfluous — " their ends " would answer every purpose. 
Mr. Collier's folio corrector has his say on this passage. 
He reads, " Smell with the touches of those flower-soft 
hands." Even Mr. White seems a little astray here, 
for he says : " If Mr. Collier must be literal, does he 
not know that cordage will swell with handling? " Now, 
to relapse for a moment into soberness, is not this the 
meaning ? — the " tackle " or cordage, loosened by the 
flower-soft hands, swelled with the swelling of the 
sails which the "tackle" confined and regulated? Mr. 
White, with a proper sense of the absurdity of " smell," 
remarks : " Though it may be a very pretty compliment 
to suppose that the ' tackle ' would ' smell ' (sweetly, of 
course,) with the touches of the hands of Cleopatra's 
ladies, the world will thrust upon me the profoundly true 
observation, mulier recte olet ubi nihil olet." 

Another passage over which has arisen a perfect blaze 
of idiocy is this from Timon of Athens, in which Flavins 
is lamenting his master's prodigality : 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 73 

" When our vaults have wept 
With drunken spilth of wine; when every room 
Hath blazed with lights, and bray'd with minstrelsy ; 
I have retired me to a wasteful cock, 
And set mine eyes at flow." 

Of course this is very obscure. Hanmer interprets 
" wasteful cock " as a cock-loft or garret ! Warburton coin- 
cides. Pope changes it to " lonely room." Knight reads 
"from a wasteful cock." Chalmers thinks it means a cis- 
tern waste-pipe. Now, why not " improvident rooster ? " 
and " retir'd " in the sense of " gone to bed " ? — meaning 
that having been up all night, he had not gone to bed 
until an unnecessarily vocal chanticleer was announcing 
the too-evident approach of day. There is nothing like 
a little common-sense in interpreting such passages ; and 
what can Mr. White be thinking of when he says that the 
words in question mean wine-cask cock, or faucet ? 

Mr. White takes Johnson severely to task for his inter- 
pretation of Lear's words, "Age is unnecessary;" and if 
Mr. White is right, it ought to be embraced in the present 
collection of the absurdities of Shakespearian criticism. 
Johnson thinks the words mean, " Age has few wants ; " 
Mr. White thinks they were used ironically to mean, 
" Age is superfluous." With great deference, we submit 
that for once Johnson is right, and for once Mr. White is 
wrong. Let us look at the context. Lear has been com- 
plaining to Regan of the treatment which he has received 
at the hands of her sister, Goneril, who has dismissed some 
of his followers — " She hath abated me of half my train." 
Regan replies that he is old, and " should be ruled, and led 
by some discretion that discerns your state better than 
yourself ; " and asks him to return to her sister, and say 



74 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

he has wronged her. Hereupon Lear flies into a passion, 
and kneeling down, rehearses the speech which he imag- 
ines himself to deliver to Goneril, asking Regan to " mark 
how it becomes the house : " 

" Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; 
Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg 
That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food." 

The gist of the matter is his complaint at having his 
comforts and the number of his servants reduced ; nothing 
about his being in the way ; and so he asks Regan to note 
how unbecoming it would be in him, an unthroned king, 
to confess to his daughter that she was right in reduc- 
ing his train, and in compelling him to beg for the bare 
necessaries of life. It is worthy of note that Shakespeare 
has here enumerated the items which the law regards as 
" necessaries " — a fact which may well be cited to show 
that Shakespeare had received a legal education. 

One of the best satires on Shakespearian criticism is 
John Poole's Travesty of Hamlet, with notes after the 
manner of Pope, Johnson, Warburton, etc., published in 
London in the early part of this century. As it is not a 
familiar book I will give an extract. First the text : 

" Ophelia. I thank you — so 'tis best — you counsel right — 

My coach — three thirty-five — good-night, good-night." 

Then the commentary : 

" My coach — three thirty-five — 

" This is an exquisite touch of nature. Ophelia is now 
wavering between sense and insanity ; she calls first for 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. ?$ 

one coach, and then for three hundred and thirty-five 
coaches." — Warburton. 

" This I allow to be an exquisite touch of nature, but by 
the illustration which the Right Reverend has attempted 
its force is obstructed and its beauty obscured. Three 
thirty-five is evidently the number of the hackney-coach 
which brought Ophelia to the palace. And here the poet 
has given an instance of his unbounded knowledge of 
human nature. In a short interval of lucidity Ophelia 
calls for her coach ; and then, regardless of the presence of 
the ' Majesty of Denmark,' she calls for it by its number, 
335. This is madness pathetic and interesting ; had she, 
as Dr. Warburton erroneously supposes, called for three 
hundred and thirty-five coaches, it would have been a repre- 
sentation of madness too terrific for exhibition on the 
stage. Madness is agreeable only until it becomes out- 
rageous." — Johnson. 

The reader of Dickens will remember in Nicholas 
Nickleby that Nicholas, while a member of Mr. Crummies* 
theatrical company, went with Miss Snevillici, the leading 
lady, to solicit the patronage of the leading townspeople 
for her " bespeak " or benefit. Among others, they called 
on Mr. Curdle. " As to Mr. Curdle," says the author, " he 
had written a pamphlet of sixty-four pages, post octavo, 
on the character of the nurse's deceased husband in 
Romeo and Juliet, with an inquiry whether he really had 
been a ' merry man ' in his lifetime, or whether it was 
merely his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her 
so to report him. He had likewise proved, that by alter- 
ing the received mode of punctuation, any one of Shake- 
speare's plays could be made quite different, and the sense 
completely changed ; it is needless to say, therefore, that 



76 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

he was a great critic, and a very profound and original 
thinker." 

Having been long engrossed by a passion for the study 
of Shakespeare, I was of course aware of the existence of 
this tract. Many years' fruitless search for it had, how- 
ever, long since left me in despair of ever finding a copy. 
The author, whose modesty was equal to his merit, had 
printed but few copies, and those only for private circula- 
tion. Consequently, it never found its way into any of 
the great repositories of literature. Although Mr. Dickens 
refers to it, he does not say that he ever saw it. He 
may have derived his information respecting it from Mr. 
Crummies, or from some member of his theatrical com- 
pany. I had made most thorough researches and inquiries 
among the descendants of the Crummies family, and 
among the descendants of nearly every prominent mem- 
ber of that company, but in vain. My nearest approach 
to success was when I was informed by a grandson of 
Mrs. Henrietta Petowker Lillivick, that he had heard his 
grandmother say that she had once possessed a copy, but 
not esteeming it of much value had given it my inform- 
ant's father, when an infant, to play with. I abandoned 
the search some years ago, but recently stumbled on a per- 
fect copy of this inestimable treasure by merest accident. 
In the year 1869, I discovered it in the cabinet of curi- 
osities belonging to the late Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne 
(formerly customs-officer at Salem, Massachusetts), an 
account of which may be found in that gentleman's sketch, 
entitled A Virtuoso's Collection, and which, at the date 
of that sketch, was the property of the Wandering Jew, 
by which designation Mr. Hawthorne was understood to 
mean the author of Lothair. By the courtesy of the 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 77 

family of Mr. H., I was permitted to inspect this singular 
collection at my leisure. This precious volume lay be- 
tween Alexander's copy of the Iliad, and " the Mormon 
Bible in Joe Smith's authentic autograph." 

My delight at the discovery was greatly enhanced by 
observing that this copy (No. 6 of 25 copies taken off on 
large paper, none on small) seems to have been presented 
by the author to the great antiquary, and bears on its fly- 
leaf this inscription : " To Jona. Oldbuck, Esqr., from his 
obdt. servt. and co-labourer, Cream Curdle." 

By the permission of Mr. Hawthorne's family I am en- 
abled to present to the literary world an outline of the 
argument of this masterly treatise. It is a singular and 
significant coincidence, that this should occur contempo- 
raneously with the publication by other literary seekers, of 
the lost books of Livy, which also formed a part of the 
Hawthorne collection. As the discovery of the long-miss- 
ing portions of Livy may render it necessary to re-write 
Roman history, so it is possible that my discovery may 
establish new canons of Shakespearian criticism. 

My only regret in connection with this subject is, that 
I am not able to furnish the public with any information 
as to the ingenious critic, beyond what is given in Mr. 
Dickens' historical essay on the boarding schools and 
theatres of England, known as Nicholas Nickleby. His 
life seems wrapped in as much obscurity as that of the 
great author whom he has done so much to illustrate. 

The introduction to the treatise is as follows: 

" Human ingenuity seems to have exhausted itself in 
conjecture on the principal characters of Shakespeare's 
drama. As to the precise degree of duskiness that ob- 
scured Othello s skin ; as to Hamlefs age and figure ; 



78 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

whether the third Richard really had a hump ; and a 
thousand similar inquiries, there seems to be no room 
for discussion, although they are by no means settled 
points. But in the chase after the prominent and ap- 
parent, it has long appeared to me that many of the 
great dramatist's more recondite beauties have lain un- 
admired, and many of his more hidden difficulties unex- 
plained. In the crowd of the great, the grotesque, and 
the striking, the humble have mingled unnoticed. It has 
long been my favorite project to write a series of essays 
on these neglected passages and personages, and to do 
my modest endeavor toward presenting to the world all 
that can be ascertained or conjectured of their meaning 
and history. I am the more persuaded to this task, be- 
cause I believe that every line and word of this prodigious 
genius is fraught with weighty significance, and that every 
character to which he makes even remote allusion is in- 
tended to convey a lesson. 

" Then, again, I suspect that the popular judgment is 
erroneous in regard to many of the characters of the 
Shakespearean drama. For instance, I am by no means 
ready to admit that Sycorax, the dam of Caliban, was as 
black as the world generally supposes Shakespeare in- 
tended to paint her. True, he puts very harsh sentiments 
concerning her into the mouth of Prospero, but it must 
be remembered that the magician had driven her from her 
sovereignty, usurped her possessions, and enslaved her 
son, and naturally would not entertain kindly feelings 
toward her. We hate none so deeply as those whom we 
have injured. A defence of this unpopular but deeply 
slandered lady was to form the subject of one of my 
essays. 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 79 

" Another essay I had projected on the geography of 
Shakespeare. I would show what great natural changes 
have been wrought since the times in which the scenes of 
his plays are laid. For example, Bohemia, now an inland 
country, must once have had a seaport, and Mantua, re- 
garded in modern times as a rather unhealthy locality, 
was so salubrious in the days of Romeo and Juliet, that 
an apothecary had nearly starved to death there for want 
of custom. 

" Another essay I had designed on the punctuation of 
Shakespeare, to show that by altering the received mode 
of punctuation any of his plays could be made quite dif- 
ferent, and the sense completely changed. For example, 
in Romeo and Juliet, the following passage has always 
seemed obscure to me : ' Serva?tt. Madam, the guests 
are come, you called, my young lady asked for, the nurse 
cursed in the pantry and everything in extremity,' etc. 
Now what is the sense of ' the nurse cursed in the pan- 
try ? ' Who should curse her in the pantry, and why 
should she be cursed ? Of course, the inference is, that 
she was cursed by the other servants ; but why, pray ? 
And why should one servant inform her mistress that 
these other servants were cursing the nurse ? This is all 
wrong. Now we know that Juliet was of a hot and im- 
petuous temper, and that the nurse was her personal at- 
tendant. We may infer, too, that nurse, like other ser- 
vants, was frequently out of the way when wanted. Let 
us then alter the punctuation, and a flood of light breaks 
on us from this passage, and renders it at once sensible 
and characteristic : ' Madam, the guests are come, you 
called, my young lady asked for the nurse, cursed in the 
pantry, and everything in extremity.' " 



80 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

Then follows the passage from the play in relation to 
the nurse's deceased husband, which is too broad, as well 
as too long, for quotation here. The reader will not find 
it in the judicious Mr. Bowdler's Family Shakespeare. 
The gist of it is that Nurse has been gabbling away about 
Juliet and her age, and tells how when she was an infant 
she fell down and bumped her forehead : 

" And then my husband— God be with his soul ! 
'A was a merry man — took up the child," 

with a rather indelicate jest, to which the precocious Juliet 
responded " Ay." 

The commentary then proceeds : 

" The first query that naturally arises in an examina- 
tion of these passages is whether the nurse's deceased 
husband really was a merry man in his lifetime, or whether 
it was his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her 
so to report him. All will agree that there is nothing in 
his language as reported that evinces any wit or a merry 
disposition. Consequently, the widow must have referred 
to some general trait which really, or in her imagination, 
characterized him. I am not aware that the husbands of 
nurses, as a class, are more merry than other men. Nor 
am I aware that widowed nurses are more apt than other 
widows to attribute merriment to their deceased spouses. 
We must look then for idiosyncrasies really existing in 
the husband's character, or supplied by the wife's imagi- 
nation. Now can anything be found in the context to 
indicate that the deceased had any especial cause for mer- 
riment ? I think so. The context shows that during his 
life his wife was engaged in the occupation of a nurse. It 
also depicts the husband as sitting and watching the in- 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 8 1 

fant Juliet in her gambols. I infer, for reasons hereafter 
adduced, that this married pair had no children at the 
time in question. These things being so, the husband 
was evidently not an active contributor to the support of 
himself and his wife, but the latter supported both. 
Surely this was a situation well calculated to afford mer- 
riment to the husband. It would certainly be so regarded 
by most of modern husbands ; for although there is in the 
masculine mind a theoretical abhorrence of the wife's 
earning the family subsistence, yet it seldom assumes a 
practical form. 

" Starting with this foundation, we next infer that the 
husband's merry disposition was actual rather than ideal, 
for the reason that wives who support their husbands 
are not apt to invest them with any merely imaginary 
virtues. 

" It has been conjectured by some that Nurse intended 
by the words, ' 'A was a merry man,' to indicate his occu- 
pation, and to say that he was a professional buffoon or 
zany. This is a conjecture not to be despised. The pro- 
fession of a merry-andrew was a common and popular one 
in the time of the drama, as well as in the dramatist's 
own day, and it is quite consistent that one whose wife 
was a professional nurse should himself be a clown or 
pantaloon. This hypothesis is fortified by the fact that 
at Verona, where the scene is laid, are the celebrated re- 
mains of a Roman amphitheatre, and it is fair to presume 
that opportunity, as well as tradition, would inspire in the 
inhabitants a fondness for theatrical amusements, and that 
actors and pantomimists should be in demand there. The 
only thing that contravenes this idea is the fact, already 
made apparent, that Mr. Nurse was supported by his 
6 



82 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

wife, and thus was in no need of making merry profes- 
sionally. And yet the personage in question may have 
been a jester, attached to the family of Capulet, whose 
wealth and standing were such as to justify this in- 
ference. 

" The conjecture that Nurse intended by the parenthet- 
ical remark in question, to announce her husband's family 
— ' 'a was a Merriman ' — is not to be tolerated, and is only 
cited here to show how much difficulty commentators 
have found in this passage. 

" So, too, the conjectural reading ' 'a was an American,' 
is insupportable. This reading was devised by some' of 
my countrymen, who, in venting their spite against our 
transatlantic cousins, would make Shakespeare guilty of 
a gross anachronism. That God's mercy should be in- 
voked for one because he is an American is an exhibition 
of British spite with which I have no sympathy. But the 
short answer is, that America had not been discovered at 
the time this scene is laid, and but little was known of it 
even in the dramatist 's day. 

" The conjectural emendation, * 'a was a married man/ 
has more extrinsic evidence to support it, but still I can- 
not give it my adhesion. It is claimed by those who sug- 
gest it, that Nurse made the observation as explanatory 
of the husband's conduct toward Juliet; that because he 
was a married man, he ' took up the child,' an action un- 
doubtedly more natural to the married than to the single. 
Some satirist of the married state has suggested that with 
this reading Nurse s exclamation, ' God be with his soul ! ' 
is more pertinent. This is a sneer at marriage which 
Shakespeare was not apt to make, and which I cannot ap- 
prove. 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 83 

" Another conjecture suggested to explain this obscure 
passage is that the phrase was ' mariner ' or ' marry ner,' as 
it would have been spelled in the dramatist's day. In 
this view, it is claimed, the prayer, ' God be with his soul ! ' 
is explicable on the hypothesis that the husband had been 
lost at sea. Again, say the proponents of this theory, the 
'jest ' seems, in Nurse s estimation, not to be in anything 
uttered by the husband, but in Juliet's response 'Ay.' 

' ' I cannot choose but laugh, 
To think it should leave crying and say — Ay.' 

" Now, say they, ' Ay,' or ' ay, ay, sir,' is peculiarly a 
sea phrase, and when uttered by an unknowing child to a 
mariner, would of course have been laughable, but not so 
on any other hypothesis. This is not absurd, but it seems 
unnecessary; for as I have before indicated, the ordinary 
reading is defensible, and there is therefore no need of 
refining upon it. 

" Assuming, then, that the nurse's husband was really 
' a merry man,' let us inquire as to some of his other 
characteristics. We infer that the organ of philoprogeni- 
tiveness was largely developed on his cranium. The act 
of rescuing the little child was a most kindly one. Who 
but Shakespeare could have drawn such a picture? I 
infer from this and other passages that our dramatist 
himself was fond of children. The play does not disclose 
whether the nurse's husband was also a father at the 
time of the events dramatized. I suspect he was not. 
Although not conclusive, yet the fact that his wife was a 
nurse in the family of another is presumptive evidence 
that they themselves had no family. It appears that they 
had lost a child, and I judge it to have been their only 



84 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

one. If they had had any children of their own at this 
time, the garrulous mother would have been pretty certain 
to refer to them, as well as to the lost one. This, I admit, 
is not conclusive, for women nowadays are much more 
apt to talk of dress and other vanities than of their chil- 
dren, and speak as little of their dead children as of last 
year's fashions. But there is one thing that leads me to 
be almost certain that this gentleman then had no chil- 
dren. If he had then been a father, he would not have 
been so moved by Juliet's misfortune, and so swift to 
rescue her, because such accidents are common among 
children, and their frequency hardens parents to their ef- 
fects. They let their children pick themselves up, and 
then scold them for spoiling their clothes. But when the 
children and clothes belong to others, and thus the acci- 
dent causes the custodians no expense or trouble, they 
give their sympathies play. If this had been his own 
child, with all his love of children, Mr. Nurse would not 
have been so merry. He would have regarded the 
stumble as a fault to be tolerated in other people's im- 
perfect children, but not in his immaculate offspring." 

But let us be serious, in conclusion. Conjecture has 
been usefully employed in endeavoring to determine 
whether Hamlets madness was real or feigned. Books 
have been written on this point, and some strong argu- 
ments may be adduced on either side. Indeed, a great 
Shakespearian actor believed that his madness was partly 
actual and partly pretended. My own impression is that 
he commenced with simulating and ended with reality. 
" Seneca, the rhetorician, tells us of one Gallus, a rhetori- 
cian, who imagined that the transports of madness, well 
represented in dialogue, would charm his audience, and 



SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 85 



took so much pains to play the madman in jest, that he 
became so in earnest." All are familiar with the internal 
evidences cited to prove the hypothesis of real madness, 
of which Hamlet's procrastination seems to us the most 
convincing. But the principal reason for my belief, and 
one that I have not seen adduced, is that on no other 
hypothesis can any adequate motive be assigned for the 
play. A pretended madness, assumed to gratify revenge, 
is a crude and commonplace idea on which to base the 
far-reaching consequences, and out of which to develop 
the sublime philosophy which stamps this the greatest 
of dramas. Such a plot would be exactly in the spirit of 
other dramatists — Webster, Marlowe, Massinger — but it 
is not Shakespearian. Besides, thus considered, the work 
would lose all traces of that exquisite discrimination for 
which Shakespeare is remarkable. Elsewhere he has 
treated of insanity of different degrees and nature, as in 
Lear, proceeding from filial ingratitude, in Malvolio from 
vanity, in Othello from jealousy. After these analyses, 
there would be nothing novel or forcible in the represen- 
tation of mental disorder arising from grief at the death 
of a parent, and nothing elevated in the depicting of mad- 
ness assumed as a cover for revenge. Then, again, in this 
very play, we have the madness of Ophelia arising from 
disappointed love. There is no reason to suppose that 
the dramatist intended to contrast real with pretended 
madness, for he makes no sufficient discrimination between 
them, and it cannot be that he intended in the same play 
to give two examples of madness, springing from similar 
causes. Moreover, we have had in Shakespeare an un- 
questioned instance of assumed madness in the character 
of Edgar, in King Lear. But if we regard Hamlet as one 



86 SHAKESPEARIAN CRITICISM. 

who starting out to assume madness gradually falls a 
victim to real melancholy, as one who simulating a fever 
may excite himself into an actual feverish condition, this 
drama takes on a new and startling significance. It then 
occupies a fresh field even among Shakespeare's manifold 
and wondrous creations, and furnishes us with an intellect- 
ual analysis of insanity, flowing from a spring hitherto 
unknown to literature. 

Let me say, in conclusion, that there are few old writers 
who have so small need of critical and conjectural help as 
Shakespeare. He has a vocabulary peculiarly his own, 
but his unskilled reader gets the meaning of most of his 
recondite words from the context and his own instinct. 
We are all learners at his feet. He is his own best com- 
mentator. 



GRAVESTONES: 

ESTHETICALLY AND ETHICALLY CON- 
SIDERED. 



OUR Puritan forefathers cared little to assuage the 
natural terrors of death. Indeed, one is almost disposed 
to think that they deemed it a solemn duty to enhance 
them. At all events, their neglect of the resting-places 
of their dead was well fitted to make one content to live. 
A New England burying-ground, even thirty or forty 
years ago, was the most neglected spot in the village. 
The thought of being laid away in such a place added a 
new terror to death, almost as keen as the little man's 
threat to the great man, that he would write his biography 
if he survived him. The graveyard was always placed 
where nothing would grow, and the only cultivation it 
ever received was the digging of an occasional grave. The 
ground was usually given by some citizen, who had found, 
by experiment, that he could not raise anything on it, and 
wanted to escape taxation for it. Its unsightly growth 
of weeds and grass, its ruinous fences or tumbling walls, 
its gravestones pitched in every direction by the assaults 
of the elements and the vaulting ambition of school- 
boys, all combined to make it repulsive. Everything like 



88 GRA VESTONES. 



decency in the care of it was regarded as a squandering of 
money, if not rather irreligious. Any suggestion of im- 
provement met with small favor. God's acre was left to 
the exclusive care of the proprietor. 

It is related of the late lamented Commodore Fisk, that 
when appealed to for a subscription to rebuild the fence 
around the burying-ground in his native town, he declined, 
saying that he thought it was a useless outlay ; those who 
were inside couldn't get out, and those who were outside 
didn't want to get in. This was the feeling of the whole 
community, though probably few could give so plausible 
a reason for it. 

In New England literature we get two noteworthy de- 
scriptions of the burying-grounds of that country. In 
Twice-Told Tales — "drippings with a Chisel" — Haw- 
thorne says : 

" In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown — where the dead 
have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to 
its original barrenness — in that ancient burial-ground I have noticed much 
variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back, 
or more, have borders elaborate, carved with flowers, and are adorned with 
a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other 
lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub to 
direct the mourner's spirit upward. These productions of Gothic taste must 
have been quite beyond the colonial skill of the day, and were probably 
carved in London, and brought across the ocean to commemorate the de- 
funct worthies of this lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere 
slabs of slate in the ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set 
off the bald inscriptions. But others — and those far the most impressive, 
both to my taste and feelings — were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of 
the island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and rela- 
tives. On some there were merely the initials of a name ; some were in- 
scribed with misspelt prose or rhyme in deep letters, which the moss and 
wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These, these 
were graves where loved ones slept ! It is an old theme of satire, the false- 



GRA VESTONES. 



hood and vanity of monumental eulogies ; but when affection and sorrow 
grave the letters with their own painful labor, then we may be sure that they 
copy from the record on their hearts." 

And in Judd's almost forgotten but powerful novel, 
Margaret, we read : 

' ' This spot, chosen and consecrated by the original colonists, and used for 
its present purpose more than a century, was conspicuous both for its eleva- 
tion and its sterility. A sandy soil nourished the yellow orchard grass that 
waved ghost-like from the mounds, and filled all the intervals and the paths. 
No verdure, neither flower, shrub nor tree, contributed to the agreeableness 
of the grounds, nor was the bleak desolation disturbed by many works of art. 
There were two marble shafts, a table of red sandstone, several very old head- 
stones of similar materials, and more modern ones of slate. But here lay the 
fathers, and there too must the children of the town ere long be gathered, 
and it was a place of solemn feeling to all." 

In the reaction against Puritan asceticism, it is possible 
that in our burying-grounds we are in danger of going to 
the opposite extreme, and of detracting from the proper 
dignity of the place by making it too much a theatre for 
artistic display. In modern practice, the cemetery is the 
pleasure-ground and park of the locality. It has the finest 
site, the greatest abundance and variety of trees, the best 
roads, the most picturesque lakes and water-falls, the 
handsomest bridges, the most inviting lodges and summer- 
houses, and everything is contrived to make us forget 
death. In short, the cemetery is now the perfection of 
landscape gardening. In the midst of the beauties of 
natural scenery, skilfully enhanced by art, it seems essen- 
tial that the few objects designed to mark the proper 
use and purpose of the place should be regulated by 
good taste and correct principles of art ; and that the 
cultivated sense should not be shocked by obtrusive and 
inartistic erections that almost make one sigh for the 



90 GRA VESTONES. 



huckleberry bushes of the New England graveyard of old 
time. 

Let me offer a few practical suggestions about grave- 
stones, or mortuary monuments, restricted to out-door 
monuments of private individuals. 

The first point to be settled in the selection of a grave- 
stone is the material. In this regard, durability is the 
main requirement. Here there is not much room for 
choice, for our climate imposes strict limitations in this 
matter. Ours is not, so to speak, an " out-of-doors " cli- 
mate. A material which would be proper in the sunny 
clime of Italy would soon become impaired under our 
own stormy sky. Experience has shown that white 
marble will not answer in our climate. It soon becomes 
stained and defaced, and unless constantly scoured, like 
Aladdin's lamp or Mr. Stewart's house, it quickly loses its 
characteristic purity and beauty. Besides, it looks too 
cold under our cool sky, and when the earth is covered 
with snow, the whitest marble looks dirty. Sandstone is 
too friable, and yields too readily to the disintegrating 
influences of the weather. This has been proved by its 
use for many years in this country. The sandstone obe- 
lisks transported from Egypt to Europe have already, it is 
said, suffered much loss of sharpness of outline in their 
hieroglyphics. Nature has provided in every climate the 
material best adapted to the local architecture. The 
Carrara quarries of Italy and the sandstone quarries of 
Egypt furnish the materials best fitted for those countries, 
and in our land we need look not beyond the granite hills 
of New England. Granite seems on all accounts our best 
resource for mortuary monuments, not only for its superior 
durability, but because it is capable of a brilliant and last- 



GRAVESTONES. 9 1 



ing polish. Bronze is a very beautiful and durable mate- 
rial, but it can appropriately be used only in large forms, 
and is intrinsically, as well as for this reason, very costly. 
Modern use has conformed to the evident necessity of 
the case, and granite is now almost the only material from 
which out-door monuments are constructed. In respect 
to color, good taste banishes everything like variety from 
our graveyards, but a pleasing and good effect is produced 
by intermixing, with certain shapes of granite, our blue or 
reddish limestone, or the red Scotch granite, which takes a 
beautiful polish. The proper use of the Scotch granite is 
in combination, and not by itself, for an isolated shaft of 
Scotch granite looks painfully like cheap pottery. It has 
occurred to me that in the use of red granite a good effect 
might be attained by rough dressing and smooth dressing 
in combination with polished surfaces, which mode of 
treatment is so effective in the gray granite. A pleas- 
ing effect may also be attained by the combination of 
the light Concord with the dark Quincy granite. It is 
difficult to imagine what could have induced the adoption 
of those streaked and variegated cheap marbles which are 
sometimes seen in our older cemeteries, and which so 
strongly reminds one of that soap which prevails in coun- 
try inns, or of those ingenious monuments of soap which 
were common in the Philadelphia Exposition. The use of 
colored glazed tiles in out-door monuments is of doubtful 
propriety, as well in point of durability as in point of 
color. It is to be noted that the Quincy granite is unfit 
for receiving inscriptions, as its dark color renders them 
nearly illegible, and necessitates the use of paint or gild- 
ing, both of which are perishable and unpleasant to the 
eye. 



92 GRA VESTONES. 



In regard to construction, it may be observed, that in 
addition to the evident necessity of a deep foundation, 
below the frost-line, there should be as few joints as pos- 
sible, and these should be horizontal rather than perpen- 
dicular, in order the better to resist the effect of the ele- 
ments. For the same reason, the joints should be over- 
lapped as much as possible. Owing to these laws, the use 
of tiles is objectionable in point of durability ; the frost 
and the wet are quite apt to displace them. 

It is evident from these limitations of material and 
color that the main resource of the designer must be in 
form. The cardinal rule as to form is that it shall be 
simple and severe. To my own taste, intricate carving 
and tracery, the elaborate Gothic forms, are out of place 
in a burial-ground. This is not the place for the display 
of dexterity in handling or skill in constructing. The 
forms should not be so attractive as to engross the atten- 
tion for the art's sake, nor so delicate and slender as to 
become the prey of the elements. Probably the Cande 
monument in Greenwood cemetery is popularly admired, 
but to me it is one of the most repulsive of monuments, 
in respect to form, saying nothing of durability. It is a 
sort of a sugar-candy order of architecture that is more 
appropriate to a confectioner's window than to a ceme- 
tery, but is not so much to be wondered at when we 
remember that it was executed after a design by the young 
lady herself. 

I think it may be laid down as a rule of good taste that 
the principal lines of a monument should be few, straight, 
and compact. As durability is the chief requisite, it can 
best be attained by simplicity and solidity. Of course 
there may be well rounded and curved surfaces, but they 



GRA VESTONES. 93 



should be subordinate. Curved or concave lines in a shaft, 
excepting as flutings of a column, are entirely wrong, just 
as they are in a tower, or would be in the wall of a house. 
Anything like pagoda architecture should be avoided. 
The lines of a shaft may be converging or parallel, but the 
ascent should be decisive, not hesitating. The pure obe- 
lisk is always grateful to the sense, and the idea of ascent 
is best attained by isolation ; a single shaft is better than 
a number of pinnacles. It is probably the gratefulness of 
this feeling of ascent that dictates that the principal lines 
should be perpendicular rather than horizontal. The 
spirit is not elevated by the contemplation of a low hori- 
zontal structure. And yet I do not deny that much has 
of late been accomplished in the use of horizontal lines, 
rising to a moderate height. Indeed, I think some of the 
most beautiful monuments in our modern cemeteries are 
in this form. But if this form is adopted, it should be in 
large and solid blocks. Nothing is more offensive than a 
slab laid on the earth, or mounted on legs like a table. It 
must always be borne in mind, however, that large hori- 
zontal surfaces require more care and are less durable 
than perpendicular structures. The slabs in old grave- 
yards, overgrown with moss, grimy with dirt, and with 
their inscriptions obscured, are disheartening objects. The 
use of the horizontal form, too, should always be sincere ; it 
should never seem to be what it is not, as for example, a 
sarcophagus. Literally, there is nothing in such an ob- 
ject. It does not even indicate a like object hidden 
underground, and if it did, it would be all the more offen- 
sive to good taste. 

Mortuary chapels should be marked by simplicity. The 
mortuary chapel in the Troy (N. Y.) cemetery is a model 



94 GRA VESTONES. 



of this kind of erection, in every point of view — materials, 
color, form, and expense. It presents a refreshing con- 
trast to a very elaborate and pretentious chapel in the 
Cincinnati cemetery. 

In regard to columns I must say that except in combi- 
nation with a building, I think they are not in the best 
taste for monuments. A column is properly an integral 
part of a building. It supports something. But a column 
standing alone suggests nothing but ruin or incomplete- 
ness, and on esthetic grounds these ideas are not to be 
tolerated in a cemetery. However it may be in human 
estimation, I suppose in the divine eye the life of man is 
always complete, or if ruinous, it is man's own fault, and 
attention should not be invited to that failure. Incom- 
pleteness in the human sense is not ruin. The idea of 
discontent or repining should never be represented in a 
monument. Rather the expression should be of sub- 
mission, faith, aspiration. So the broken columns, which 
used to be so common, are not esthetically commendable, 
it seems to me. I once saw the use of the column singu- 
larly debased — I think it was in Greenwood — where three 
columns, broken off at different heights, were used to in- 
dicate the different ages of deceased members of one 
family. 

At all events, the column must not be adopted as a 
support for anything foreign to its natural use, such as a 
cross, a statue, or any of those ornamental bird-cage de- 
vices, so common in modern Italian monuments. The 
sense of congruity is shocked by the Christian cross on 
the top of a pagan column, especially when placed, as I 
have seen it, on the top of an Ionic column, with its capi- 
tal of rams'-horns, the imitation or suggestion of Jupiter's 



GRA VESTONES. 95 



locks. A statue on a column is always abominable in an 
artistic view, both from the sense of insecurity and of ex- 
cessive remoteness. The Nelson monument, at London, 
and the Washington monument, at Baltimore, are the 
time-honored jests of the artistic world. I cannot conceive 
a case where a statue on a column could have any signifi- 
cance as a mortuary monument, unless it were a memorial 
of St. Simeon Stylites, who lived constantly for fifty-six 
years on the top of a pillar, " elevated in height as the 
saint drew nearer heaven and to perfection." 

In regard to the use of statuary in out-door monuments, 
if it is permissible in an esthetic view, of which I have 
some question, it must be conceded that granite, the only 
fit and not over costly material for our climate, is very illy 
adapted to statuary. In the very best treatment of which 
it is capable, its lines are always harsh, both in facial ex- 
pression and in drapery. As to marble, it must be said 
that unless a statue is more meritorious as a product of 
art than can proceed from any place but an artist's studio, 
we can well afford to dispense with it in our cemeteries. 
The statuary of the average gravestone manufacturer is 
quite detestable. Respectable statuary, like respectable 
poetry, is unendurable. A pure and high work of the 
imagination, like Palmer's Angel at the Sepulchre, at the 
Albany (N. Y.) cemetery, is exceptional, and outside the 
rule which we would lay down for the exclusion of statuary 
from the cemetery. The same may be said of the exquisite 
bronze ideal figure in the Troy (N.Y.) cemetery. It may be 
superfluous to remark, that the use of statuary in mortuary 
monuments should always be emblematic or ideal ; any- 
thing like portraiture in a graveyard is not to be tolerated 
for an instant. The busts or statues of private men are of 



g6 GRA VESTONES. 



little contemporary interest, save to their families, and of 
none at all to general posterity. Let their effigies be pre- 
served at home like the Roman household gods. A 
shocking display of family portraiture in a graveyard is 
found in one of the most expensive monuments in this 
country, in central New York, where life-size statues of 
the widow and daughter are weeping over the bust of a 
departed husband and father, all under a great glass case. 
Even a portrait statue of a public man is better placed 
in a more public and common situation. The proper 
place for our conventional soldier's monument in the form 
of a statue is a public square or park, where it may con- 
stantly appeal to the busy passers. Boston has recognized 
the force of this idea, by placing the statues of her great 
public men in her public gardens and the grounds of her 
public buildings, rather than at Mount Auburn. I will 
make one exception to this rule ; a mortuary chapel in a 
cemetery is an appropriate place for a bust or statue of a 
public man who is there interred. But this exception ex- 
tends only to public men. The public are not supposed 
to care for the effigies of private persons, and any parade 
of them is objectionable. In the cemetery at Coopers- 
town, overlooking Otsego Lake and the village founded 
by his ancestors, is a monument in memory of Cooper, 
the novelist, surmounted by an ideal statue of Leather- 
stocking, the hero of so many of his romances. This is a 
good example of the proper employment of ideal statuary 
in the burying-ground, and although a monument to a 
public man, is properly placed in the peculiar circum- 
stances. If my memory serves me right, the statue is 
supported by a column, which is objectionable for the 
reasons I have mentioned. 



GRA VESTONES. 97 



It is a fundamental canon of art, that mere imitation of 
cheap, common, and ephemeral objects and materials 
should be eschewed. This law is applicable to the adorn- 
ment of cemeteries. To illustrate this idea: a heap of 
stones, with a rude, wooden, bark-covered cross thrust 
into it, and the whole overgrown with vines, in certain 
circumstances is a touching and appropriate memorial, 
but certainly not where anything more dignified or more 
durable can be afforded. But the imitation in stone of 
such a monument — a very common imitation — is entirely 
indefensible by the laws of art. The more skilful the 
imitation in such a monument, the worse the art. It is 
insincere and unworthy — insincere because it professes a 
poverty which it does not suffer, and unworthy because 
it calls attention simply to the dexterousness of the art. 
There are, of course, instances in which a common object 
has acquired an emblematic use, and may therefore be 
properly imitated in stone, as for example, the anchor, 
the Christian emblem of hope. But such use should 
generally be strictly emblematic. Any attempt to use 
such an emblematic form to signify the occupation of 
the tenant of the grave or the manner of his death is 
ordinarily vulgar. And where the emblem is adopted, 
the imitation should be confessed ; we must not use the 
real thing. For example, we could not tolerate an iron 
anchor on a monument. Still less could we endure even 
the imitation of an anchor over the grave of a manufact- 
urer of anchors. Occasionally, where the occupation or 
the manner of death was one that was essentially noble 
or heroic, or appeals to our higher sympathies, such an 
adaptation may be tolerated. Thus I see nothing incon- 
gruous or inartistic in the adoption of the anchor for the 
7 



98 GRA VESTONES. 



monument of a seafaring man, on account of its religious 
symbolism, but I have some doubt about the artistic pro- 
priety of adding the cable and capstan, which simply 
designate the man's business in life. In fact, anything 
commemorating the commercial occupation of the tenant 
of the grave can serve no purpose save to indicate that 
the old business is still carried on at the old stand by the 
sorrowing survivors. For example, on the monument of 
an expressman at Mt. Auburn, bas-reliefs depicting the 
modus operandi of the express business, such as a horse 
and wagon at full speed, and a big dog guarding a safe, do 
not raise devout emotions in the spectator. I once saw 
at the grave of a sea-captain, in Springfield, Mass., a dis- 
masted ship on her beam-ends in the grass, carved out of 
stone. Whether this was intended also to signify that the 
deceased had been lost at sea, I do not know, but it seems 
hardly artistic, as the representation of a ship cast away in 
the grass calls up no sensation of terror or sympathy in the 
beholder. In myself it excited quite a different sensation* 
It made me think of the story of the canal boatman, who 
was narrating the circumstances of a wreck on the " raging 
canal," in which the noble vessel went down, and every 
soul on board perished save himself. " But how did you 
escape ? " was the inquiry. "Well," said he, " I see how 
things was goin', and so I took my boots and stepped 
ashore." Now a monument that can suggest such an un- 
dignified reminiscence can hardly be artistically right. It 
is possible that such representations in the form of bas- 
reliefs on the surface of the monument may be permis- 
sible, but when they are made to assume an independent 
attractiveness, they lose their place. The famous " hay- 
stack" monument, at Williamstown, Mass., is an example 



GRA VESTONES. 99 



of the mingling of good and bad taste in this particular. 
This monument is built to commemorate the origin of the 
American Foreign Missionary system, on the spot where 
it was devised. The tradition runs that the projectors 
were in the habit of sitting under a hay-stack on the spot, 
and counselling together. So we have a hay-stack chis- 
elled in relief on the side of the shaft. It might be taken 
for a projectile for a rifled cannon, or for a Dutch cheese. 
What pertinency it has, unless to suggest that all flesh is 
grass, I cannot imagine. On the top of the shaft is a 
massive globe, designed to represent the world, with con- 
tinents and islands faintly outlined on it. This is not so 
bad, but it would be better if the literalism of the outlines 
had been omitted. It is a wonder that the designer did 
not paint the heathen parts of the world in black. But 
let us be thankful that the hay-stack was not put on top 
instead of the globe. An example of a monument repre- 
senting the manner of an heroic death, is found in the 
famous firemen's monument at Greenwood — the statue of 
a fireman with a rescued child in his arms. I am not 
aware whether this represents an actual and particular oc- 
currence, or is typical merely, and placed over the graves 
of brave firemen who have lost their lives in the perform- 
ance of duty. This is an instance so strongly appealing 
to the best sympathies of our nature, that the idea adopted 
is entirely right ; but it may be questioned whether it 
would not be better expressed in a high bas-relief. A 
most offensive example of the imitation of common 
and prosaic things, I once saw in a representation of a 
baby's worn pair of shoes chiselled on a gravestone. 
Nothing could be worse than this — but the real article, 
and that I once saw in a glass case on the top of a grave- 



100 GRA VES TONES. 



stone in a country burying-ground. The imitation of 
animal life on gravestones is usually prohibited by good 
art, even when designed to be emblematic. Let all the 
sentimental lambs be put into some other pasture than 
the graveyard. Sentiment is admirable, but sentimental- 
ity is sadly misplaced there. And do not let us have any 
doves and little boys on ponies. An exception to this 
rule exists in the case of monuments to public heroes, as 
for example, the famous lion at Lucerne, commemorating 
the devoted Swiss Guard who perished in defence of Louis 
XVI., 'and a most touching example in the Troy ceme- 
tery, where, at General Thomas' tomb, the eagle guards 
the patriot hero's sword. We have outlived the conven- 
tional weeping willow, and I hope, the broken flower and 
the broken rose-bud also. I am tired of broken rose-buds, 
but in the contemplation of a canker-worm gnawing off a 
rose-stem, on a monument at Newburyport, I experienced 
a more uncomfortable feeling than fatigue. 

Our forefathers used alternately to terrify the survivor 
with skull and cross-bones, and enchant him with a cherub's 
head at the top of the gravestones, both usually equally 
terrific, by the way. All objects simply suggestive of 
death or decay should be ostracized. Of the sarcophagus 
I have spoken. Urns, I am glad to observe, have pretty 
much gone out of vogue, and the pall has had its day. 
Nothing more incongruous can be conceived than an urn 
in a Christian burying-ground, for cremation was a heathen 
custom, and if it should be reinstated in favor, there would 
be no use for monuments except as receptacles for the 
urns, in which case the urn would no longer be in sight. 
It is a pretty safe rule to dispense with all sorts of natural 
and artificial objects in the ornamentation of tombstones. 



GRA VEST ONES. I O I 



Of course the rule, like every other, has its exceptions, 
but like all other exceptions they simply tend to confirm 
the rule. The objection to such things is that they are 
apt to degenerate into sentimentality. Conventional ob- 
jects and emblems may be indulged in, but they should 
be evidently appropriate and in harmony with our religion. 
I even think that the pagan butterfly would be more 
appropriate than a lamb over the grave of a child, for 
although the latter is the emblem of innocence, it may 
occasionally, in spite of the proverb that the good die 
young, find a place over a particularly terrible child, and 
so lose the advantage of truth ; but the butterfly is the 
classic emblem of immortality and resurrection, and so is 
always appropriate. But it is quite safe to leave off such 
things. Again, all devices which simply draw attention to 
the personality of the deceased are inappropriate at the 
grave. For example, although every monument should 
exhibit the surname and the several christened names, 
what is the use of parading in addition the monogram of 
the head of the family ? This is too much like the sta- 
tioner's art, and makes one think of "no cards." The 
only monogram that I ever saw on a monument that is 
tolerable is one composed of alpha and omega. But no 
monogram, or any other device, ever ought to be cut on 
the shaft. For the same reason, I think coats of arms 
are objectionable. The graveyard is no place for the 
" boast of heraldry." Reserve them for carriages and 
plate. Besides being misplaced, they are in this country 
generally as false as epitaphs themselves. I have objected 
to portraiture. Occasionally I have seen medallions of 
the deceased on monuments, but it seems to me they are 
not in correct taste. The monument is designed to mark 



102 GRA VES TONES. 



the resting-place, and to perpetuate the memory, not the 
face or figure. Why should we struggle to preserve for 
the public gaze what God has decreed to perish ? Banish 
such memorials to county histories. Let the perpetua- 
tion of the form exist in memory alone, so far as the 
monument is concerned. Another advantage in this 
course ; imagination may convey to the stranger and to 
posterity a more favorable idea of the physiognomy than 
portraiture would do. A good many years ago there was 
a fashion in New England, in rural districts, of inserting a 
daguerreotype of the departed in the upper part of the 
gravestone ! I suppose this ridiculous custom no longer 
obtains, but except in dignity of material and excellence 
of execution, it is only less absurd than carving a portrait 
medallion in the same place. 

But if there is anything better deserving the prize for 
offensiveness than all others, it is any indication of an 
assumption that the tenant of the grave is a partaker of 
the glory reserved for the saints. Expressions of hope 
and trust in this regard are all well, but we ought to be a 
little modest about taking it for granted. A hand with 
an index finger pointing upward is a common example of 
what I mean. There is a vast amount of assumption in 
this sort of device, and in regarding the gravestones of cer- 
tain persons whom I have known, I have thought that an 
asterisk would more correctly direct the thought. Now 
I never see this upward-pointing index finger without 
being reminded of a certain story, and as it was told me 
by a clergyman there can certainly be no harm in my re- 
peating it. In certain localities in New England they 
have shops where they manufacture and keep on hand for 
sale a stock of ready-made gravestones with devices, in- 



GRA VES TONES. 103 



scriptions and epitaphs suited to every occasion, and only- 
lacking the particular data, which are filled in to order. A 
farmer who had been deprived of his wife by death, wish- 
ing to show proper respect to her memory, and also to 
save time, asked a neighbor who was driving to market, 
to go to a shop of this description, and select for him a 
handsome head-stone for his wife, and at the same time 
gave him the necessary data for completing the inscrip- 
tion. The neighbor performed the errand, and in due 
course of time the stone was sent home executed in the 
first style of the art, with a touching epitaph about 
" mother " at the bottom, and at the top a hand with the 
index finger pointing upward, and under it the words " no 
graves there," all very appropriate apparently. But some- 
how it did not seem quite to suit the purchaser, for the 
fact was that his surname, and consequently that of his 
deceased wife, was — Graves ! Prophetically, as well as 
historically, it probably had an unpleasant significance. 

As to inscriptions they form a fertile subject of them- 
selves, and are hardly within my province, but I may be 
allowed to offer one suggestion — eschew conventionality 
and pedantry. Conventionality is always unpleasant, but 
when associated with an affectation of learning it becomes 
ridiculous. "Mors janua vitce" has been carved over 
many a grave, but to me it now only serves one purpose, 
and that is to remind me of an anecdote of Lord Kenyon, 
who was always quoting Latin incorrectly, and was very 
parsimonious. When his lordship died, " mors janua vita " 
was displayed on the hatchment. This served to empha- 
size his pedantry and his ignorance, but a wag of a lawyer 
insisted that the misspelling was intentional on his lord- 
ship's part in order to save the expense of the diphthong ! 



104 GRA VES TONES. 



Every object in a Christian burying-ground ought to be 
consonant with the Christian faith. It is for this reason, 
in part, that urns are out of place there. The same 
idea would exclude everything like imitation of distinc- 
tively pagan forms of architecture, unless they have 
received the Christian sanction by use. I suppose the 
use of vaults will always be retained by those who shrink 
from bowing to the divine decree of " dust to dust," but if 
we are to have vaults, let us not have them in pagan forms. 
For example, let us not construct a vault in the form of 
an Egyptian tomb with the exterior symbols of that re- 
ligion. A Greek temple is not so incongruous, because 
we have to some extent adopted Greek architecture in 
our religious edifices ; but a Greek temple was not a place 
of sepulture, and we have better resources than either 
of these anachronisms. Standing the other day in Mt. 
Auburn, I saw a monument in the form of a sphinx, com- 
memorating the downfall of slavery and the suppression 
of the Rebellion. But why a sphinx ? It has no signifi- 
cance as a memorial of those who perished in the war, for 
Christianity will not admit that their fate involves any 
riddle. Possibly, however, it may convey a hint of the 
riddle of political reconstruction, or the unvarying silence 
of the great man who commanded our armies. 

It remains to speak of a matter only indirectly connected 
with my subject, but of prime importance in any considera- 
tion of it, and that is, the cost of graveyard memorials. 
The expense of modern funerals has assumed such bur- 
densome proportions as to call forth a protest from the 
clergy of many places, and the same excessive luxury and 
display have been carried into our cemeteries. 

Some men are never content in life unless they lift the 



GRA VEST ONES. 105 



eaves of their dwellings above their neighbors' houses ; 
and among such there seems to be a sort of posthumous 
contest for the tallest and most costly monuments. I 
have said that all mortuary monuments should be simple 
and severe. Ostentation is horribly vulgar, as mere matter 
of ethics, in a cemetery, which ought to be the most 
democratic and levelling place on earth. Do the best we 
may in point of plainness and economy, such memorials 
will cost enough. A fashionable gravestone designer can 
command his own prices. I have now in mind a monu- 
ment not very large, and by no means elaborate, which is 
said to have cost $10,000, or as much as a good dwelling- 
house with all the " modern improvements." The profit 
on such an erection must be enormous. How insignificant 
in every point of view is that monument when compared 
with one erected by the same person at half the expense, 
in the form of a bequest for a historical alcove in a public 
library. Better to have reversed the application of the 
two amounts. 

Now I suppose a single individual has a legal right to 
erect a monument costing $10,000 or $50,000, but I very 
much doubt whether he has any moral right to do it. 
Expenditure beyond a modest sum in this direction does 
no good. It does not educate like a school or a college; 
it does not cultivate like a gallery of art ; it does not 
shelter like an asylum ; it does not heal like a hospital ; it 
does not redeem and inspire like a church. Almost under 
the shadow of pretentious monuments, families are starv- 
ing and freezing. If God has given a man abundance of 
this world's goods, and he wishes to erect a monument to 
himself, let him build in'charity, in religion, in love, and 
let him attach his name to the donation, if he is in dread 



106 GRA VEST ONES. 



of being forgotten, but do not let him heap up a pile in 
the cemetery, which will only call attention to his vanity 
and selfishness, and frequently to his smallness. I have 
noticed that the size and cost of mortuary monuments are 
generally in inverse proportion to the moral and intellect- 
ual worth of the builder. A man who made a fortune in 
pills or petroleum will cause a chapel to be erected over 
his grave, which will cost more money than Milton, Michael 
Angelo and Beethoven got for all their works. It is not 
for all to fulfil the Roman poet's boast, that he would 
build for himself a monument more lasting than brass. It 
is not of every one that posterity will say, as it says- of the 
architect of St. Paul's, " If you seek his monument, look 
about you." Nor will the most lavish outlay on our part 
preserve our monuments or our memory. The most 
magnificent monument ever erected, that of Mausolus, 
King of Caria, which was one of the seven wonders of the 
world, has long since disappeared, and " Mausoleum " calls 
up no suggestion of the origin of the word or image of 
the monument. To whose memory were the Pyramids 
erected? In contemplating the Castle of St. Angelo, we 
forget that it was the mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian. 
The tomb of Cecilia Metalla survives two thousand years 
of Roman history ; but the poet Byron, at the close of 
five magnificent stanzas devoted to conjecture upon the 
woman in whose memory the grand pile was erected, can 
only say : 

" But whither would conjecture stray ? 
Thus much alone we know, Metalla died, 
The wealthiest Roman's wife ; behold his love or pride ! " 

On the other hand, the mound of Marathon is imperish- 



GRA VE STONES. 107 



able, and so is the deed which it commemorates. The 
simple slab on Bunker Hill, inscribed " Here Warren 
fell," is more attractive to the pilgrim than the towering 
obelisk under whose shadow it lies. What monument 
more touching than the little flag which a grateful coun- 
try annually plants on the graves of the heroes and 
patriots who died that we might live ? In the Troy 
cemetery has recently been erected the hugest monolith 
of modern times, at an outlay of $50,000, over the grave 
1 of General Wool, a man who it is safe to say will not 
loom up in very large proportions in historical perspec- 
tive. In contrast with this is a modest, low head-stone, 
almost hidden in the grass, in the old Concord burying- 
ground, bearing no inscription but a name — but that 
name the greatest in American literature — Hawthorne. 
That unique genius probably put his own sentiments into 
Miriam's mouth — at all events a wholesome and weighty 
sentiment — when he made her say : 

" It is a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to leave 
no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly and 
speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with marble. 
Methinks, too, it will be a fresher and better world, when it flings off this 
great burden of stony memories, which the ages have deemed it a piety to 
heap upon its back." 

At Arqua are the mansion and sepulchre of Petrarch, 
of which the poet sings : 

«« * * * B th plain 
And venerably simple, such as raise 
A feeling more accordant with his strain 
Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fame." 

If one would have his memory " smell sweet and 
blossom in the dust," he must build for others, not for 



IOS GRA VESTONES. 



himself. Otherwise he will share the common fate — to 
be forgotten. A great or sweet life needs no care on the 
part of him who lived it. What will signify those gleam- 
ing masses on the wooded heights to him who shall sail 
up the Hudson a hundred years hence? But the public 
charities founded by those who slumber there will endure, 
and bless like the twice-blessed attribute of mercy. 

" Such graves as these are pilgrim shrines ; 
Shrines to no code or creed confined ; 
The Delphian vales, the Palestines, 
The Meccas of the Mind." 










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